[I, Afterlife][Essay in Mourning Time]
[by Kristin Prevallet]
Essay Press / 2002
I’ve just finished Kristin Prevallet’s I, Afterlife – and big thanks to Anne Heide, Erik Anderson, Nan Burton, and Rachel May, who spent several hours with me recently exploring this text, helping me to articulate my own questions and ruminations around it. (And on that note, my thoughts, in part, come from a kind of synergy generated through our discussion, and at the same time I don’t want my own limitations here and now to poorly reflect upon those other writer/reader’s brilliance…!)
We discussed, among other things, the “hermeneutic of the gap” this text suggests, and again considered the question of white/negative/blank space within work/on the page. Our discussion reframed existing questions for me in a more expansive field.
I often think of such space within a text as a series of gaps where erasure abides. Meaning: such gaps are haunted.
A mode of haunting achieved when linguistic marks, through a process of sublimation (a term Prevallet uses), enter into the gaps within our texts, including the spaces between the words within our texts. A sublimation brought on by editing or other purifying fires that lead towards the essentialization of our work.
Thus I have often told students in intro classes: don’t be afraid to erase what you have written, do not be afraid to edit. Because it all gets in and in a way that suggests ghosts are fact. No effort is lost, rather: all marks unseen infest, if invisibly. Nothing is something and is there.
Which is to say, our group conversation encouraged me to ask: what other possibilities exist in terms of the gap (a question energized by Anne’s thoughts about gaps/spaces as “deliberate silences”)? Can any gap go unhaunted? What (else) have I failed to imagine? (a question of imagination that is good for me to ask myself, and a lot). Our group conversation brought up such questions - and of course the text itself.
On page 10, Prevallet writes,
Believing that holes can be filled with language is dangerous –
only space itself occupies empty spaces.
On page 46 she writes,
What fills the gap: forms of elegy.
And on page 60,
The challenge is to recognize this anti-matter as some kind of sustenance…
Further thinking about erasure (its relationship to gaps and as a text-crafting strategy – editing, sublimation) at one point Prevallet writes (on page 7, [Will]):
[…]
I wonder how that can be, but then I remember my first attempt
to pour concrete into a body gaping with wounds.
I find this last sentence overly dramatic.
Please scratch it out.
I keep returning to the last two lines of this piece. They sit within the text in such a way that when I come upon them, I make contact with one of my own inner-realms of devastation. Far from being clever or cheeky, these reflexive lines return me to a lip-biting place of deep humility.
The author charges the reader with editorial (sublimation) instructions instead of enacting them herself - which puts me in mind of Prevallet’s notion of open closure: Open closure: a sketch of black and gray space, a field upon which any act of violence can happen. (pg 15).
So, then - what other possibilities exist in terms of the gap?
Can any gap go unhaunted?
What (else) have I failed to imagine?
As a way to more deeply engage with these questions, I have decided to ask others how they experience, understand, and engage with gaps, and I will post their responses here.
