Calamities

I BEGAN THE DAY THINKING that in order to write a talk on “The Ongoing Story” I would need to incorporate it into these essays I’d been writing about my life. I began, “I began the day staring into the face of the question of narrative—was anybody still interested in it, and, if so, why?” It was a simple question to ask but had taken me eight days to write—you’d think it impossible to construct a sentence two words at a time, writing two words then taking the rest of the day off then on the next day writing two more words, maintaining the thread the whole time, until finally, on the eighth day, you had it, the sentence, but this sometimes happened when you were writing about narrative inside of narrative. Recently, I had found that to talk about something that was in essence everything was simply too exhausting, and that the only way around it was to talk about the question of the thing rather than the thing itself, since in the end, it would become both. “Narrative—” I went on with my talk, “Was anybody still interested? I didn’t want to open my eyes to it. I hadn’t wanted to think about narrative at the same time that I was conscious of my body lying in the object world. It was a problem of space similar to what Martha and I were discussing yesterday: Was it possible to say that something was gathering outside of a thing with the intention of meeting something else when this something else was the larger space in which that first thing existed? Could I talk about narrative as I was operating within it? I closed the quotes enclosing the text for my talk and took a train to New York. I wanted to surround myself with other people who were thinking about narrative and asking themselves whether they were for or against it. Someone was having an event that evening, and it seemed appropriate to the essay that I narrate the events of the event before they actually happened. But not for the essay inside which I was writing the panel talk, rather the outer essay in which I felt isolated and needed to travel three point five hours to be among people. When I opened the quotes again for the talk I was thinking, It wasn’t just narrative we were talking about but narrative in relation to poetic time, which was not the time of the object world in which I was lying but was the time of the essay to which I was attempting to draw the object world. Once the object world arrived I hadn’t figured out what I would do in it (though you see the complication I was unearthing since I was already in it, the object world). Alev Ersan had left by this time. I wanted to tell her that the problem of poetic time was not a fiction, as I’d been, for years, calling it. Fiction did not concern itself with problems of time. If there was a problem inside a fiction—a problem of any nature other than what's happening inside the plot—then the whole thing would swell and small holes would form across the surface and the swellings would become as large as mountains while the holes would fill with water and become river valleys and soon we would be so far from the surface of the water that we’d recognize the picture of the mountains and valleys as a part of a geological map and recognize ourselves standing in an object world much larger than the object world in which we’d been lying when we began this essay. I closed the quotes when I bottomed out. I would have to open my eyes if I wished to understand fully where I was and whom I was with, if anybody. The figures forming in the light directed toward my closed lids (by the sun or the lamp I’d failed to turn off before falling asleep the previous night or by the panel talk that I was living rather than writing) would not grow in definition as long as I carried on not-seeing in this way, I thought as I closed the quote on this narrative. I didn’t want, in the middle of the whole thing, to become anti-narrative. After the event in New York, which was formulated around the celebration of the appearance of a long-awaited thing, I was disappointed to find people more anti-narrative than narrative. Someone took my number instead of giving me hers—this was anti-narrative. We spent hours at a restaurant called the Half-King and were given the wrong check, which, when corrected, turned out cheaper than the right check. This was anti-narrative. Those of us standing around the table, hoping there would be enough money to cover the bill, were thinking anti-narratively about the people who had evaded this torture by departing early, their contribution left behind. When we found there was enough money, even extra, we thought anti-narratively about our previous anti-narrative attack on those others. I wanted to turn our living toward narrative so suggested we all take the subway home. This was not agreed on, but we did all walk off together. Somehow it was only the black people who’d been in attendance that remained in our group. We walked along 23rd Street and I called Alev Ersan and counted off the number of black people with me. I counted seven, narratively. This was astounding, but I didn’t tell the other black people what I was thinking, only Alev Ersan. This was anti-narrative. But clearly I was happy, as this configuration of blackness did not occur for me in the lonely little white city that I’d fled, thus was narrative. But within that, an anti-narrative moment, when I had to remind myself that it wasn’t the little city that was white but rather the neighborhood in which I’d chosen to live. Imagine my surprise when I found it was possible to be both narrative and anti-narrative at the same time, which was like being a little overwhelmed in a large crowd. I was again pointed to a problem of time, or rather, space in time (it was hard to figure). How would I escape this crowd, but just to get outside it? Would it be possible to leave my name with someone? I closed the inner essay to look at the outer. I wanted to find a word or sentence that would prove there was an even larger essay that was a further outside of this one. I closed the quotes of lying in the bed with my eyes closed, and opened my eyes, looking literally into the face of the question of narrative, which was the emptiness of my apartment and the long stretch of day that lay ahead. “It would be good to begin another essay,” I thought on the tail end of this one.

I BEGAN THE DAY GIVING a lecture to a group of university students. I said, “—” and made a certain gesture with my hand. They asked, “How do you know,” with some small showing of contempt. Well, I was trying to say, “It’s okay to think,” but maybe what they heard was “You don’t think” or “You are not thinking.” I made the “Let’s start again” gesture with my eyebrows, and calm was restored. I started over from the top, “In any case, one can see the
city—” I was interrupted before I could replace the errant word. These were conservative students. I mean, “The sentence!” I yelled over their clamor. And as they grew quiet, one of them muttered, “You don’t think,” but he hadn’t planned on being heard. He said, “I think you don’t think?” by way of correction. We were trying to get to the heart of the matter. I said, from the head of the class, “This is really good,” and smiled grandly, with so much love falling from my cheeks I worried that Alex Peters, sitting in the front row, might explode with grief. Everyone else grew sad, too. Someone—I don’t remember who—raised her hand. She said, “We answer the way we do because we don’t like your questions.” And she was also smiling. I couldn’t tell if this was a joke or something crucial about my teaching. I went on with my lecture, “When you turn in your mind, you reach somewhere, open something, make some gesture.” I paused. My notes had quotes around them. I was almost done.

I BEGAN THE DAY WITH the sense that if I could write down all of the words I encountered in Karasu’s Gece, made a list of them then sought out their definitions, the eventual accumulation would most probably represent the entirety of the vocabulary of the Turkish language. It was determined that, by the date of my departure—six months hence of copying down that first word—I would be able to enter the culture and portray myself as a fluent, integrated speaker. This was a great plan, but it had taken hours to surface. I wanted to start right away. To my surprise, the first word of the book happened to be the title itself. I wrote “gece” and then “night” in a parallel column. I wrote “yavaş yavaş” (the second and third words of the book, which of course were the same word, though used differently from the first to the second) then wrote “slow” and “‘slow’” respectively. When I went to write down the fourth word I found that I was exhausted. It occurred to me that I should nap before continuing the list. I had not slept the previous night, and I was beginning to feel a creeping desire to snack. As everyone knows, it’s hard to make a list without simultaneously shoving bread or cheese in one’s mouth. I had to choose eat or sleep, which also meant choosing Turkish or no Turkish, at least for that day. It wasn’t as if I’d actually made a choice, just that at some point in my deliberations the doorbell rang and pulled me out of the first dream I’d had in weeks, which could only mean I’d been asleep, which must have happened despite the debate I’d been pursuing. It was all quite elusive for several long moments. The bell rang again. I opened the door to my apartment and yelled, “Merhaba,” down the stairwell, precisely mimicking Rosetta Stone. “Nasılsınız,” I said as Alev had taught me. “Iyiyim,” I answered, though no one had asked how I was. “Ne yapıyorsunuz,” I asked because nobody was saying nothing and I wanted to know what was going on. I walked quietly down the stairs but threw my voice so he wouldn’t know I was coming. “Ikindi vakti,” I said, because it was “the time of the two.” So much was going on, and I’d been progressing so slowly down the stairwell, that I’d forgotten all about what I’d left upstairs—Gece, the snacks, the reported nap. When finally I arrived, I yanked open the door and shouted with g-force, “Kaç tane,” because that was the first thing I had thought of. It wasn’t pertinent. It didn’t matter how many there were. I walked back up the stairs sleepier than ever with a package of what I believed to be the new Levitsky.

I BEGAN THE DAY GIVING a lecture to a group of university students. I said, “—” and made a certain gesture with my hand. They asked, “How do you know,” with some small showing of contempt. Well, I was trying to say, “It’s okay to think,” but maybe what they heard was “You don’t think” or “You are not thinking.” I made the “Let’s start again” gesture with my eyebrows, and calm was restored. I started over from the top, “In any case, one can see the
city—” I was interrupted before I could replace the errant word. These were conservative students. I mean, “The sentence!” I yelled over their clamor. And as they grew quiet, one of them muttered, “You don’t think,” but he hadn’t planned on being heard. He said, “I think you don’t think?” by way of correction. We were trying to get to the heart of the matter. I said, from the head of the class, “This is really good,” and smiled grandly, with so much love falling from my cheeks I worried that Alex Peters, sitting in the front row, might explode with grief. Everyone else grew sad, too. Someone—I don’t remember who—raised her hand. She said, “We answer the way we do because we don’t like your questions.” And she was also smiling. I couldn’t tell if this was a joke or something crucial about my teaching. I went on with my lecture, “When you turn in your mind, you reach somewhere, open something, make some gesture.” I paused. My notes had quotes around them. I was almost done.

I BEGAN THE DAY THINKING that in order to write a talk on “The Ongoing Story” I would need to incorporate it into these essays I’d been writing about my life. I began, “I began the day staring into the face of the question of narrative—was anybody still interested in it, and, if so, why?” It was a simple question to ask but had taken me eight days to write—you’d think it impossible to construct a sentence two words at a time, writing two words then taking the rest of the day off then on the next day writing two more words, maintaining the thread the whole time, until finally, on the eighth day, you had it, the sentence, but this sometimes happened when you were writing about narrative inside of narrative. Recently, I had found that to talk about something that was in essence everything was simply too exhausting, and that the only way around it was to talk about the question of the thing rather than the thing itself, since in the end, it would become both. “Narrative—” I went on with my talk, “Was anybody still interested? I didn’t want to open my eyes to it. I hadn’t wanted to think about narrative at the same time that I was conscious of my body lying in the object world. It was a problem of space similar to what Martha and I were discussing yesterday: Was it possible to say that something was gathering outside of a thing with the intention of meeting something else when this something else was the larger space in which that first thing existed? Could I talk about narrative as I was operating within it? I closed the quotes enclosing the text for my talk and took a train to New York. I wanted to surround myself with other people who were thinking about narrative and asking themselves whether they were for or against it. Someone was having an event that evening, and it seemed appropriate to the essay that I narrate the events of the event before they actually happened. But not for the essay inside which I was writing the panel talk, rather the outer essay in which I felt isolated and needed to travel three point five hours to be among people. When I opened the quotes again for the talk I was thinking, It wasn’t just narrative we were talking about but narrative in relation to poetic time, which was not the time of the object world in which I was lying but was the time of the essay to which I was attempting to draw the object world. Once the object world arrived I hadn’t figured out what I would do in it (though you see the complication I was unearthing since I was already in it, the object world). Alev Ersan had left by this time. I wanted to tell her that the problem of poetic time was not a fiction, as I’d been, for years, calling it. Fiction did not concern itself with problems of time. If there was a problem inside a fiction—a problem of any nature other than what's happening inside the plot—then the whole thing would swell and small holes would form across the surface and the swellings would become as large as mountains while the holes would fill with water and become river valleys and soon we would be so far from the surface of the water that we’d recognize the picture of the mountains and valleys as a part of a geological map and recognize ourselves standing in an object world much larger than the object world in which we’d been lying when we began this essay. I closed the quotes when I bottomed out. I would have to open my eyes if I wished to understand fully where I was and whom I was with, if anybody. The figures forming in the light directed toward my closed lids (by the sun or the lamp I’d failed to turn off before falling asleep the previous night or by the panel talk that I was living rather than writing) would not grow in definition as long as I carried on not-seeing in this way, I thought as I closed the quote on this narrative. I didn’t want, in the middle of the whole thing, to become anti-narrative. After the event in New York, which was formulated around the celebration of the appearance of a long-awaited thing, I was disappointed to find people more anti-narrative than narrative. Someone took my number instead of giving me hers—this was anti-narrative. We spent hours at a restaurant called the Half-King and were given the wrong check, which, when corrected, turned out cheaper than the right check. This was anti-narrative. Those of us standing around the table, hoping there would be enough money to cover the bill, were thinking anti-narratively about the people who had evaded this torture by departing early, their contribution left behind. When we found there was enough money, even extra, we thought anti-narratively about our previous anti-narrative attack on those others. I wanted to turn our living toward narrative so suggested we all take the subway home. This was not agreed on, but we did all walk off together. Somehow it was only the black people who’d been in attendance that remained in our group. We walked along 23rd Street and I called Alev Ersan and counted off the number of black people with me. I counted seven, narratively. This was astounding, but I didn’t tell the other black people what I was thinking, only Alev Ersan. This was anti-narrative. But clearly I was happy, as this configuration of blackness did not occur for me in the lonely little white city that I’d fled, thus was narrative. But within that, an anti-narrative moment, when I had to remind myself that it wasn’t the little city that was white but rather the neighborhood in which I’d chosen to live. Imagine my surprise when I found it was possible to be both narrative and anti-narrative at the same time, which was like being a little overwhelmed in a large crowd. I was again pointed to a problem of time, or rather, space in time (it was hard to figure). How would I escape this crowd, but just to get outside it? Would it be possible to leave my name with someone? I closed the inner essay to look at the outer. I wanted to find a word or sentence that would prove there was an even larger essay that was a further outside of this one. I closed the quotes of lying in the bed with my eyes closed, and opened my eyes, looking literally into the face of the question of narrative, which was the emptiness of my apartment and the long stretch of day that lay ahead. “It would be good to begin another essay,” I thought on the tail end of this one.