Pattern-book: Éireann Lorsung
Éireann Lorsung on gesturing towards an ethics of the simile
1. When I am walking through the city where I live, which is usually Dublin these days (though I write this from the outskirts of Los Angeles), flashing across it are facsimiles of the other cities and non-cities I have lived in. At first, on arriving, this flashing is a way of navigating what is new and dauntingly unfamiliar: the flashes are an overlaying of two places that confirm my being-at-home in the place that is new to me. Ah, I think, this is the Korenmarkt of Indianola. Ah, this is the IDS Tower of Nottingham. Ah, this is the Beeston of Ghent. But soon this way of navigating is insufficient: the place I am proves itself to be exactly and only itself. The flashes grow a little distance and what had been an overlay becomes a space to leap across. I begin to be able to see that X is not Y, but may still be like Y in ways that also teach me how it is unlike Y, and both likeness and unlikeness teach me to see my preconceptions about the world, and to learn to attend to what I overlook. As a writer, but also as a live-er, I am interested in unlikeness and in what it teaches me about likeness too.
2. In her essay "Bewilderment", an essay I return to over and over, the poet Fanny Howe writes that bewilderment is "a poetics and an ethics", by which, she writes, she means "a way to enter the day as much as the work". For the poet, "the work" is poetry. For the live-er, the work is living, and it is more or less synonymous with "the day", by which I take Howe to mean "the world and activities of the living for the duration of lived time". When I think about ethics, which for me as for Howe is not separable from aesthetics, Howe's definition is always first in my mind. Entering the day. How will I enter it? Why that way? How else is possible?
3. About four years ago I got fascinated by the simile, a device I had up to then mostly ignored. We had moved from Maine, on the east coast of the U.S., to a small town in south-central Iowa, in the U.S. midwest. This was the first time I had lived in the region where I was born since I was in my early twenties, at which point I had left the city of my birth to be a teaching assistant in France and then—though I didn't know it when I left—to live in the English midlands, then in the western provinces of Flanders for a dozen years. Being back in the Midwest did not feel at all like a homecoming: Indianola was not Minneapolis, river city of the northern woods where I grew up. The town was severe. Black flags hung in front of houses with white columns. I took my daily walk on the berm behind the Wal*Mart, looking down at the Dumpsters and up into the blue sky that went out endlessly in all directions. I made my way through town, keeping the grain elevators in my peripheral vision. I rode my bicycle through shimmering heat to the campus of the tiny college where I taught. The intense song of the cicadas lasted from our arrival in August through the middle of October.
The autumn semester of that year, I taught a classroom full of football players and basketball players who had enrolled in my poetry course because a coach had said it would be "easy". I knew nothing about poetry would be easy, though much might be enjoyable, for students who had never spent time thinking about it before. The coach's confidence that poetry would be "easy" made me stop and think about the things I now do in writing as thoughtlessly as breathing. Pretty much everything about the world has taught me that things I assume are simple are often intricately complex—that the appearance of simplicity may be complexity disguised by familiarity, sometimes, or by unfamiliarity, other times. When I find myself thinking that something doesn't bear thinking about, I try to turn myself back toward that very thing as the object of my thought; almost always, I am rewarded with new complexity (and sometimes by intense humility).
This brought me to the simile. Without the buy-in that English majors bring to a writing class, and wanting my (at first disenchanted) students to have a rich and thought-provoking encounter with many traditions of poem-making, I pivoted toward the miniature. We would think about a few gestures, and really try to figure out what made them mean. The simile was one of these. Not the metaphor—device of transformation I often used to help students think about association and the magic possibility of poetic meaning—but the dry little simile, with its like and as holding a little distance between imagination and the world as it is. Simile, which I, too, thought of as easy.
4. Sitting in a badly lit room in Kortrijk, I open the manuscript the editor at Carcanet has asked me to send. I am meant to finish it this month, but it feels miles from done. Right now, it is just a bunch of poems in a document, some very old, some only sort of old, and some newer, some quite new. How will I make a book when I have collected poems written across five countries and nearly twenty years? But I trust the intuition that said choose this one and put this one in there. I slowly begin to sort the poems into groups. The postcard poems, written to a close friend whose writing has accompanied my own for twenty years now, step forward to suggest a structure for the entire manuscript: one in each section, yes. And then I see these poems written to my friend are also about teaching writing and learning to write—and that makes me realise how many poems I've collected here are about language, about learning to read (not only books, but social forms and histories and relationships and artworks). Then there are poems about artworks themselves and about artmaking, and its relationship to writing. Here are elegies—I did not realize there were as many as there are—and poems of place, written mostly for places I have lost. And these? Long poems, mostly in fragments? Little songs, to call back to the little songs that sonnets are: there are sonnets all through the book. I begin to see that the poems written across so much time and space are not at all discontinuous. Instead, they show me the likenesses of my poetic life: that I have a few central concerns; that these have shown up over and over in my writing. I think about time, and language, and pictures, and the people I love, and the places I am. There are bicycles and rivers and gardens and kitchen tables in my poems because my life has been spent on and along and in and at them. There are brothers, fathers, mothers, friends, and teachers because all through my life I have spent my time with exactly these people. I begin to be able to extemporize on my own themes: draw out likenesses or help them recede. The sonnets begin whole and gently break apart over the course of the book—sonnets like sonnets and also unlike sonnets. The fathers who are living at the start are elegized at the book's end. The Belgian painters appear and disappear. The cycle of seasons that begins in childhood opens out beyond us at the book's final line. I save the document, I close the laptop. I go out to walk in the little West Flemish city, which I know so well and which is like no place so much as itself.
5. Grapevine, blue vase, on my table in Indianola, Iowa. Sent to me by Neele one Christmas in Olsene. Brought with me from Belgium to Maine, to Iowa. Now living on the mantelpiece in our flat in Dublin. There in the past of the poem's making, the two-inch tall porcelain vase, glazed dark blue, reflects the rare early autumn rain through which the lights of the big trucks come and go. I am miserable, but it will ease. In a week—though I don't know it yet—the two dozen football players and basketball players in my class will all be on side and then we will begin to do the best thing teachers and their students can do together, which is fly. But in the present of the poem the blue vase is a consolation and a reminder of a place that is not here, and all I can think is how much I would rather be not here.
I put a twig of grapevine I collected on my walk into the vase. Its stem is knobbly, and the knobbles, and the lengths of growth they demarcate, feel like going from here to here to here. Like the vine, the vase and I have traveled from here to here to here. No transformation. Just likeness and unlikeness: this place is not those places. I am myself and not the self I was. And yet I can sense some touching. The rain continues. I put on the Debussy record I like. I think about my students and about the simile, which I am still trying to explain to them. It is not just a comparison, I told them in our last class. It is a device—a kind of technology—for magnifying what is similar and what is dissimilar. And when we are attentive to likeness, really attentive, we can begin to see relationships among things we may have discounted. Simile should do that for us, help us see exactly and precisely what's in front of us and what else that thing is like, and how. That thinking may begin on the microscopic scale but it's the same thinking we use to think through big structural likenesses and unlikenesses. The simile teaches us to see difference: the little like, as holds two things apart and won't let us forget it.
I write a letter to Neele in the form of a little book, working out my thoughts for class. What is a simile?, I write. Put one thing next to another, and say here. The here is where the somethings touch. The grapevine nods in its vase, and the record comes to the end of the side. The rain, like rain, continues to fall.
6. In autumn of 2022 I was newly arrived in Dublin and teaching an MA seminar on poetry, for which I had decided to set the collected poems of Emily Dickinson as a primary text. Each week, as the semester went by, I realized that more and more of the other people in the room were not interested in what Dickinson was doing. She is nothing like me, said one student, when I asked the class to talk about where the general resistance to Dickinson was coming from. That's true, I agreed. She is nothing like most of us: for one thing, she is dead. I had just returned to Dublin from burying my father, who had died surrounded by all of us, in Minneapolis, two weeks before. Though he had never especially talked to me about Dickinson, he had loved poetry and loved his poetry teacher in college. Now my father, like Dickinson, was dead, although he and she were otherwise mostly unalike. "After great pain," a poem of hers goes, "a formal feeling comes – / The Nerves sit ceremonious like Tombs". In the nearsightedness of grief I thought I could read nothing more like my life than Dickinson's linking of grief and form. Dickinson's poems are too small, another student said. Her poems are small, I thought, but what is too small? I felt her work was as dangerous to carry as an incendiary device: intensely packed into itself, ready, on the slightest trigger, to expand explosively. What is a too-small poem?
I began to think about Dickinson and smallness—apparent smallness and actual smallness, smallness as a subversive tactic and smallness as just an ordinary possibility—and again returned to the simile, which is a 'minor' gesture in poetry, and yet had captured my thought for years. It wasn't Dickinson's use of simile but the way she could be dismissed as "too small" that felt like simile to me. Just as I had for so long left simile by the wayside because it seemed almost too basic, I remembered being an undergraduate student and dismissing Dickinson, too, more or less because she was "too small" for me, meaning interior and domestic, and also meaning gnomic. She was not too small, but my world of those days was not like hers: I had to be dispossessed of my belonging and my assumed bigness, had to learn to walk and look at the weeds and the shapes of churches and the orders in which I was embedded. I had to get small and get closer to death to love Dickinson, and then I began to find her everywhere, in a world made up mostly of very small things that repeat themselves until they constitute the entire field of the possible.
We finished the semester and I set the purple Faber edition of Dickinson's Collected Poems I had carefully annotated all semester on the shelf next to the edition that belonged to Matt's mother and was left to him when she died, and next to the edition that came with me from a thrift shop in Nottingham to the house in Ghent and then to Olsene, to Farmington, to Portland, to Indianola, to Dublin. Now these three editions will follow me, rhyming their book forms against one another, like and unlike in their contents and bindings, and one day someone else will pick one up in a thrift shop, and take it home, and open it to read "All life went out – when He went –".
7. As someone who has lived for much of her life in places she does not "belong" by birth or citizenship, I have taught myself—here's Howe again—to try to resist the sense that anything could be beneath my notice, no matter how small or ordinary or familiar. (I think many immigrants train themselves this way. We have to, because nothing here is like we thought it would be. It's certainly not like those other places we carry in our heads and lay over the landscape when we arrive. And some of us have to pay such attention because if we do not attend to minute unlikenesses and likenesses, we will be found out, and there may be real trouble.) Again and again, making my slow ways through the landscape, I look at the weeds, the walls, the cracks in the pavement, the movements of birds, the people I pass, the buses and cars, the marks made on the various surfaces, the water, the litter. Looking and walking, I am teaching myself in a fractal way to see various kinds of relationships: formal ones, including relationships of size and mass and volume; compositional ones; geographical ones; relationships of color and of texture and material; relationships between space and exertion—my own circulatory system's reading of a place. All those minute attentions teach me about making poems, which is to say, about making likenesses of the world that want to say something about likeness and about the world.
8. Very long ago now, I wrote a doctoral dissertation on reading and love and deconstruction. Central to what I was trying to say were a moment in an interview given by Jacques Derrida, and part of an essay by Emmanuel Lévinas. In both texts, the men are trying to articulate something about how to "approach the day". Asked whether deconstruction isn't in the end destructive, Derrida replies that "even to ask a question, you must first tell the Other that I am speaking to you". To take something apart, he says, you have to first of all acknowledge that it is there—that it is not you. To disagree, you first have to be able to see the other person or text or idea, the world itself, as a full and separate subject. There's an affirmation in that, Derrida says. I first of all have to say yes to you. Separately, Lévinas writes that ethics is “a matter of being attentive to what is proper to the other without wanting to appropriate it”, that is, a matter of letting “beings be, [understanding] them as independent of the perception that discovers and grasps them”.
When I start to think about what drew me to the simile—and what draws me still—I come back to these two thinkers and their insistence that ethics begins in a refusal to try to fully grasp, appropriate, assimilate, internalize what is other. Instead, they urge me, leave a little space. The like, as of the simile are one kind of little space that can mark the difference across which I can relate to the world. They are a reminder that we—you and I, reader—are not together; that you are thinking, there in your chair, and I am writing, here in mine. And nevertheless, there is something between us. Electricity may travel across that space of difference.
9. Likeness is a word my language uses to mean picture of a person, especially painted picture of a person. A painted likeness has the quality of like and not the quality of is. A photograph has the quality of like as well, only it seems so immediate that it can be easy to forget the like and see it only full of is. The Ghent Altarpiece, which is also called The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, lives in St. Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent. It was painted by the van Eyck brothers in the 15th century. Parts of it have gone missing over the years, and been returned. One panel, the Rechtvardige Rechters or 'righteous judges', is still missing and a replica is in its place. The painting therefore contains a piece of itself that only looks like itself.
When the altarpiece is closed, you can see the room where, in the Christian story, the Angel Gabriel announces to Mary her impending pregnancy. The room has a window that looks out on the things windows always look out on—some hills, some trees. There is smoke in the blue distance. In the room, a towel that looks just like a towel hangs on a towel-rack that extends from the wall toward the viewer's eye. The towel could be in the bathroom of an acquaintance of yours. It is just like that. Its three blue stripes, the white cloth of it. It is a likeness of a towel that points my imagination toward the world. I know that object. I've seen it before. Not that one, though; one like it. I become a little synapse in the world's net of meaning, the likeness leaping from the painting to an upstairs room in a little house in Nottinghamshire, or in a house in Flanders, or in Minneapolis, or here, in Dublin, where I will unfold it from the hallway shelf and bring it out to you, standing at the kitchen sink, washing your hands before you sit at the table with us, with tea, with the book and the poem—those things so like the world but not the world—between us.
This week's article, ‘Like, as: gestures toward an ethics of the simile’, is by Éireann Lorsung, author of Pattern-book, which is published this month! Remember to use the code MAYBOOKS for 10% off and free UK P&P.
On Wednesday 28th May at 7pm BST (2pm ET), please join us online to celebrate the launch of Pattern-book! The event will be hosted by Jon McGregor and will feature readings, discussion & audience Q&A. Book your ticket here.
You can also join us at 6:30pm on Thursday 5th June for the in-person launch of Pattern-book at The Gutter Bookshop in Dublin! The event is free to attend and all are welcome. More information here.