{"id":139841,"date":"2019-09-30T11:30:39","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T15:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=139841"},"modified":"2019-09-30T11:30:39","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T15:30:39","slug":"rigorous-grace-a-conversation-between-leslie-jamison-and-kaveh-akbar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/09\/30\/rigorous-grace-a-conversation-between-leslie-jamison-and-kaveh-akbar\/","title":{"rendered":"Rigorous Grace: A Conversation Between Leslie Jamison and Kaveh Akbar"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Kaveh Akbar, left, and Leslie Jamison, right.<\/p><\/div>\n

Leslie Jamison makes her life more difficult than it needs to be. In her most recent essay collection, <\/em>Make it Scream, Make it Burn, the subjects she chooses\u2014the world\u2019s loneliest whale, Second Life devotees, the Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia\u2014could carry the pieces with their propulsive novelty alone. Certainly, Jamison is brilliant enough as a sculptor of language that we\u2019d happily oblige her. But what makes Jamison one of the essential essayists of our generation is her rigor. She renders her subjects, the world that made them, and her own gaze all within the same frame. In each of these essays, there is the subject, but there is also the long history leading up to it, and then there is also Jamison herself, observing and writing. So should we call her new book journalism? Or literary criticism? Or memoir? Yes. For an imagination, a curiosity, as expansive as Jamison\u2019s, there can be no partitions. Her writing, like her mind in this conversation, leaps freely between each world.<\/em><\/p>\n

AKBAR<\/p>\n

Can we begin by talking about grace? One of the things I\u2019m most drawn to in the book, and in your work more broadly, is the steady orbit you make around the idea of grace. There\u2019s a moment in one of the early essays in this collection where you crystallize it, writing: \u201cThe definition of grace is that it’s not deserved.\u201d I have been grappling with this idea in my own life, the notion that if I\u2019m capable of doling out grace only to those obviously deserving of it, it isn\u2019t grace exactly. It\u2019s kindness or it\u2019s pity or it\u2019s maybe even just propriety. What is grace to you? And what can it do?<\/p>\n

JAMISON<\/p>\n

Starting with grace is like diving into the deep end of the swimming pool\u2014so much better than slowly lowering each inch of thigh down the steps in the shallow end. Or maybe it\u2019s really like diving into the deep end of an infinity pool, where you come up to the edge and see that below is a more infinite body of water than the one you\u2019re swimming in. Which is part of what grace means to me, you feel the world get larger around you, feel yourself get smaller within it. And the world can get large around you in so many ways. As a bespoke digital wonderland, as the infinite hall of mirrors of your prior lives, as a big blue whale large enough to swallow us all. All of these things\u2014mythic whales, past lives, digital waterslides\u2014can be sources of grace. The vending machine of grace is vast and it never gives you exactly what you asked for. And that means we have to pay attention, because we\u2019re not always aware that grace has arrived. As you wrote, \u201cI live in the gulf \/ between what I\u2019ve been given \/ and what I\u2019ve received.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It makes me think of a beautiful sentiment I once heard from a stranger, Sometimes the solution has nothing to do with the problem. <\/em>I think surprise is an important part of grace. You thought you wanted cookies, but you really needed seltzer. Grace isn\u2019t the thing you planned, it\u2019s what you get instead. Which is maybe connected to the ways you and I want to uncouple it from a sense of contingency or deserving it. It\u2019s not a product of narrative or moral cause-and-effect. It catches you off guard. And it\u2019s usually quite partial, rather than utterly transformative. Like, a woman wakes up to spend a few hours in her paradise cottage, and then she leaves her computer to make breakfast for her four kids and show up for her shift at the call center. Or, you understand your dad a little better and then you have to wake up the next day and understand him a little better all over again. Et cetera. The et cetera is part of it, the ongoingness. \u201cThe boat I am building \/ Will never be done.\u201d<\/p>\n

My obsession with surprise as a crucial part of grace is connected, I think, with my obsession with thwarted narratives. I\u2019m both boggled and inspired by the ways the plotlines we write for ourselves are always getting overturned. Is there a particular way poetry can pay attention to that overturning, do you think? I think your poetry does a wonderful job honoring the force of surprise. I wonder when and how you surprise yourself when you write\u2014you must!\u2014and if that ever feels like grace. I wonder how you think about the relationships between grace and gratitude and delight, which feel so electric in your work. Like these closing lines, which I have read aloud so many times because I love them! \u201cThere is a word for these fits of incomprehensible \/ delight I said it last night \/ when my mouth was full of cake.\u201d Grace is better when we can\u2019t say its name! The sentiment works better when you let the line break keep us in a little bit of suspense after incomprehensible…<\/p>\n

Anyway, how do you write grace and its asymptotes? How has grace surprised you? How has the world gotten large around you lately?<\/p>\n

AKBAR<\/p>\n

\u201cUncoupling grace from a sense of deserving.\u201d Yes, yes, yes. I struggle mightily with this, maybe most in relation to myself. I\u2019ve conned the world into paying me to do the one thing I have any interest in doing. It\u2019s hard for me to shake the sense that I\u2019m being grossly overpaid\u2014cosmically, socially, professionally. And yes, financially. But of course the idea that I would know what I or anyone deserves is just another manifestation of my own outsize ego, right? That I should be the arbiter of such things. Thank the stars I\u2019m not. Do you deal with this at all?<\/p>\n

You build so many of these essays around surprise, an imagined version of someone\u2019s life fracturing as their reality bares itself. The old woman is noxious and entitled, then her disability is revealed, then its horrible violent genesis, then the less dramatic, less traumatic version of that genesis. At each turn, we feel ourselves recalculating our formula for how much of our sympathy, how much grace, the woman deserves. Which is so bizarre of us, and you make that bizarreness real.<\/p>\n

And it keeps happening throughout the book! A photographer protests the arrest of a poor bricklayer at the hands of crooked cops, only to learn the bricklayer had just struck his wife in the face with a belt buckle. You yourself talk about how part of you wanted to give birth just to argue against the idea that maternal love was somehow deeper than any other, only to end the essay with a direct address to the child. \u201cThere you were: an arrival, a cry, the beginning of another world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The miracle of the book is how you repeatedly enact, in real time, that fallacy of grace-as-vending-machine, grace as some moral algorithm where you put in x<\/em> and invariably receive y<\/em>. That repetition, \u201cwhich is the point\u2014the again-and-again of it\u2026 You have to keep living this willingness to look at other lives with grace,\u201d is so difficult to get a read on in living, and even harder to write. I\u2019ve tried! I\u2019ve been the beneficiary of so much grace, but it resists mere language. Resists naming, yes. To me, that\u2019s the fundamental absurdity of writing, the way language as shapes on a page, as a font, feels so completely incapable of speaking to the only mysteries worth writing about. Somehow the body has to be called in to speak.<\/p>\n

Because I\u2019ll likely never be able to return to Iran, I\u2019ve taken on the humbling work of relearning my first language, Farsi, using these children\u2019s books where I have to write the same letters, the same words, on dotted lines over and over again. The repetition is meant to mechanically etch the lexical concepts into my brain. And it works! I\u2019m getting better, slowly, and can now sound out almost any Farsi text, though a truly fluent comprehension of the sounds I\u2019m making is still years away.<\/p>\n

I bring this up to say, there is a way in which your book felt similar to me, in the best way. Like a kind of practice manual for learning to separate grace from judgment. It\u2019s an argument for love as an action. And it comes to a staggering crescendo in the book\u2019s final essays, looking closely at your own family members, the love you\u2019ve built with and for them. Can you talk about that progression, how, or if, you consciously shaped the collection toward that?<\/p>\n

You talk about breakups as useful, if not altogether happy, opportunities to celebrate what was gathered over the course of a relationship. Most of my breakups have been dominated by the sense that I\u2019d never be loved so well again, that I had fucked up with the one person who\u2019d ever be capable of loving me. And I think that sense springs from a misunderstanding of love as a static reservoir instead of as a practice\u2014as a well bucket instead of the hands lowering it into water.<\/p>\n

I read your book as a kind of argument for rigorous loving. What does rigor means to you as a writer? And how you practice rigorous love for yourself?<\/p>\n

Also, if we ever start a band, can we please call ourselves Grace and Her Asymptotes? You be Grace, I\u2019ll be the asymptotes.<\/p>\n

JAMISON<\/p>\n

I am absolutely game to start this band with you! And in fact, my terrible singing voice will provide the perfect enactment of precisely the kind of grace we are fumbling toward in this conversation\u2014imperfect and unearned, living within flaws rather than despite them, or because of their absence. I\u2019ll wear the red suede boots I once bought at an LA vintage store because I believed they could turn me into a different person, and they sort of did<\/em>, the way we are always becoming a different person, every fucking day of our lives, and sometimes red boots help us remember. I love the idea that you\u2019ll be all the asymptotes that ever were, all at once. If ever anyone could!<\/p>\n

I rigorously love your description of my book as an argument for rigorous loving. I used to believe rigor and love were mutually exclusive, or that they somehow worked against each other, that love was supposed to feel like something flooding you, something you surrendered to, rather than something you showed up for daily, tinkered with, sculpted, rediscovered. I guess another way of putting it, I imagined love as the bucket\u2019s water drenching you, rather than the hands reaching into the well to pull up the bucket, day by day\u2014to draw it out, to bring it to the mouth, to drizzle it over the garden. I love your formulation of love as practice rather than static reservoir. There\u2019s so much forgiveness in that notion of work. I used to think rigor was a sign that you were doing love wrong<\/em>, or loving the wrong person, that it made the love stingy. Now I think it\u2019s spacious and necessary to allow work to be part of love, rather than thinking of it as a pollutant.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve heard that formulation about feeling like a bucket with a hole. All the love and affirmation in the world can come in, but it still keeps leaking out. Maybe thinking of love as a practice is a way through this dilemma. It\u2019s okay to have some leaks. We have to keep the water in motion anyway. It makes me think of Lewis Hyde\u2019s The Gift <\/em>and the idea that anything you hold onto too tightly will die in your hands. I love that. I also think it\u2019s sometimes okay to want to hold onto things. That\u2019s part of what I was trying to get at in the essay about breakups, that it\u2019s human to want to preserve things, that you might want<\/em> to save the toaster you and your ex used to make your peanut butter toast each morning, and you can do that work of preservation while simultaneously understanding love as something that can still surprise you, that you don\u2019t fully know yet. To your point, each love is not the end, the alpha and omega, there might be other loves, or even other ways you can be loved\u2014by other human beings, or by God, or by big skies, or friends, or books\u2014that you can\u2019t anticipate. My friend Harriet and I are always talking about the importance of remaining curious about what we don\u2019t yet know about ourselves. This feels both transformative and manageable to me, this posture of curiosity. It makes me think of something Sontag once wrote about being interested only in people engaged in a process of self-transformation.<\/p>\n

Which all comes back to your observations about surprise! Surprise is sometimes my working definition of God. Or grace. I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about this thing that the comedian Kyle Kinane says in one of his stand-up routines, that a miracle is just the world letting you know it can still surprise you. He\u2019s talking about burning his laundry. The first time I heard that, I was driving across the Arizona desert in the middle of this pretty surreal, wonderful, uncategorizable fever dream with another person, and I thought, amen. <\/em>Being surprised means staying humble, means being perpetually being reminded of everything you don\u2019t know, everything you didn\u2019t understand. Getting expanded. You\u2019re right that many of my essays are about surprise, or are trying to find forms or structures or lines of inquiry and narrative that can dramatize surprise. I want to let it unfold on the page, rather than simply fast-forwarding to revelation or certainty. I actually think that much of my definition of rigor comes back to surprise. Among other things, rigor means letting yourself get surprised over and over again, submitting to that ongoing dislocation.<\/p>\n

For much of my life, I thought of rigor in terms of deprivation and restriction\u2014trying to conquer my own desires, my fragility, my weakness. Now I think of rigor much more in terms of abundance, in terms of how to stay grateful, remain alive to simultaneity and multiplicity. In that sense, gratitude is a kind of rigor, too. I was trying to think through this in the last essay in the collection, \u201cThe Quickening,\u201d which is about anorexia and pregnancy\u2014the body whittled, the body expanding. The work of restriction versus the work of generating. The work of becoming ample. Rigorous loving! It makes me think of a line from your gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous<\/em> essay about fasting in Marfa. \u201cI wonder if part of the point of fasting is this: keeping the body enamored of the particular delights of nourishment.\u201d Which is maybe a way of saying that the self who thought of rigor in terms of deprivation and the self who thought of rigor in terms of abundance were both wrong, because the point is that deprivation and abundance have never really been separate. Sobriety is an absence that makes room for so much plenitude. One of the things I love in your fasting essay is the way you think about fasting as a means of making porous the boundary between self and divine\u2014in that sense, it\u2019s a deprivation that doesn\u2019t just keep you alive to nourishment, it brings you into contact with something vast and mysterious and expansive.<\/p>\n

I wonder how you think about the connections between deprivation and abundance in your life and in your work? Are there ways in which restriction\u2014formal constraint, for example\u2014feel generative to you? How do you find forms and structures that can hold abundance? What does rigor feel like to you?<\/p>\n

AKBAR<\/p>\n

Oh Leslie, your words are the clarity I didn\u2019t realize I desperately needed.<\/p>\n

Yes, so much of my thinking my whole life around rigor\u2014in terms of faith, love, compassion\u2014was shaped by ideas of deprivation and self-restraint. I think it\u2019s maybe an inflection of Western\u2013I\u2019m leery of the term Western. West of what? The East? The Middle East? Where does that put the center and why? But to say European is wrong, too\u2014morality broadly. We have these ten commandments that are functionally all pronouncements about the virtues of abstinence. Don\u2019t cheat, don\u2019t murder, don\u2019t steal, et cetera. But you can avoid doing all those things for an entire life without ever doing anything useful for anyone, too, you know?<\/p>\n

This is part of what has always appealed to me about Islam, since I was old enough to be able to understand it. It seems to me to be a spiritual practice rooted in action\u2014proactively helping those who need it\u2014often in the form of zakat<\/em>\u2014is one of the five pillars of the faith, right up there with prayer. There\u2019s something in that that feels so simpatico with the vibrations of my own soul. Action, action, action. Maybe it\u2019s that I don\u2019t trust my own idleness. My friend Tommy Orange told me a story recently about a scared starving person alone in the desert who prays to God for help, and so God sends the scared starving person a scared starving child to protect. That\u2019s how God answered the prayer. I wanted to melt. It was everything.<\/p>\n

I feel furthest from sobriety when I think of it as purely an absence. Sobriety is a grace and grace is everything but absent. I love your calling it \u201cplentitude.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have been thinking about your idea of God as surprise, or surprise as God. So much of rigor in my life involves being open to revision. Open to the possibility that my best intentions were undermined by fear or ignorance or selfishness. I often find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with people who disagree vehemently with me. Who openly dislike me, even. So often I want to say, Oh wow, yes you\u2019re totally right. Sometimes I\u2019m able to actually say that, and those are occasions for gratitude. Mostly I\u2019m an oaf. I\u2019m wrong often. I love your book because it celebrates wrongness as an opportunity for course correction, a way to step a little bit closer toward the horizon of our own goodness. And like any horizon, we march toward it forever and never really arrive.<\/p>\n

Horace says a good poem must delight and instruct. I tend to think of his delight not as baby coos and kitty whiskers, but as a kind of surprise, an encounter with an unprecedented experience of language or sound or living or thinking. I find a lot of poets so eager to charge into instruction that they forget about the other side, the surprise. As writers of the English language, our medium also happens to be the deadliest and most sinister colonial weapon ever invented. Our project has <\/em>to be at least in part the breaking of the language, which is another way of saying our project is surprise<\/em>, which is another way of saying delight<\/em>, which is another way of saying God<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I am thinking of your brilliant and rending Museum of Broken Relationships essay, about the woman who has the envelope with a single stray hair from her lover who dumped her by simply not sending her any more letters. The image of her checking the mailbox, heartbroken, hoping against hope every day\u2026 that destroyed me. There was so much that a single hair accidentally stuck to an old letter could do that language could not. There was so much that the absence of a letter could do that even the very best, most searching and fearless letter could not.<\/p>\n

You write about the two journals you kept when you were actively in the throes of your eating disorder\u2014one to log calories, one to log the foods you imagined<\/em> eating. You write, \u201cYearning for things was slightly less embarrassing if I denied myself access to them, so I grew comfortable in states of longing without satisfaction. I came to prefer hunger to eating, epic yearning to daily loving.\u201d You capture the power of the fantasy, the not-ness of it, and the way not-ness becomes its own kind of sustenance. It’s brilliantly rendered, so devastating and true.<\/p>\n

In a way, the book is also an argument for daily loving over epic yearning. \u201cWhat happens when the mirage shimmers away to reveal plain asphalt straight ahead.\u201d It\u2019s a daily transformation, which brings us back to the Sontag. What self-transformation are you experiencing right now? What scares you about it?<\/p>\n

JAMISON<\/p>\n

I love what you say about charged absences. How do we break the language of our art until it is as powerful as that single hair, as powerful as that lover\u2019s silence, the empty mailbox? <\/em>It makes me think of Isak Dinesen\u2019s weird and dark and in-a-few-different-ways-fucked-up story called \u201cThe Blank Page<\/a>,\u201d about a gallery of \u201croyal wedding sheets\u201d stained with the blood of princesses, and how, of course, the sheet that holds the most meaning is the one with no stain at all. The power of silence also makes me think about the seminar I\u2019m teaching this semester, about archives and how the absences in the archives are just as powerful as their presences. Today we were talking about Saidiya Hartman\u2019s essay \u201cVenus in Two Acts,\u201d where she describes her own impulse to make up a story about two young girls killed on a slave ship during the Middle Passage. She could feel her own impulse to invent a friendship for them, to allow them to console each other, because she wanted them to have that consolation, but she also realizes the story would mainly be consoling her. <\/em>History had denied their humanity and she wanted to restore it, but she realizes there would be something false about that restoration. The silence is more violent, also more honest.<\/p>\n

Which all makes me think of a quote from my friend Kiki Petrosino, about her own work with archives. \u201cThere is something deep and sad and unassailable about the silence; I wish to amplify it rather than offer something in its place.\u201d Kiki found the signature of her ancestor, Ezekiel Beverly\u2014a man categorized by census records as a black man, unable to read or write\u2014and got that signature tattooed across her arm. A silence amplified. How do we break the language of our art until it is as powerful as that single hair? Kiki gets Ezekiel\u2019s name tattooed across her skin. Sometimes our friends do beautiful things and we get to hold those acts of beauty in our minds, as we move through the world. It helps.<\/p>\n

I am so grateful to you for saying that you often agree wholeheartedly with people who disagree with you. I do, too! But I\u2019ve always understood it as weakness\u2014a porousness or lack of certitude\u2014rather than rigor, which of course it as well. And I am now enacting the thing, yes? My sister-in-law once asked me, \u201cWould you rather have no bones or no skin?\u201d I realized that sometimes I didn\u2019t feel like I had either one! I agreed wholeheartedly with people who disagreed with me! My boneless, skinless body could be possessed by their ideas in a moment! But I like this other way of seeing it,\u00a0 in which it\u2019s a kind of willingness to be surprised, to be disrupted or overturned, to find one\u2019s laundry burned and say, A miracle!<\/p>\n

What self-transformation am I in the midst of right now? Becoming a mother, which doesn\u2019t happen in the moment of birth, it turns out, but in every moment that precedes it and every moment that follows. \u00a0My daughter is twenty months old and these months have changed my relationship to time, to space, to the sense of what a meaningful day might entail. When I am with her, I am not converting time into something else\u2014a piece of writing, a book I\u2019ve read, an email I\u2019ve returned\u2014I\u2019m simply moving through it with her, like water, noticing things, learning the names of the trees on my block, nursing in front of landscape paintings at the museum, climbing and descending the same set of stairs, over and over again, like a walking meditation practice. My daughter opened up the midnight hours for me, too, like unzipping a seam in the world. Suddenly, there was three in the morning, and we were inside it together. I was watching Handmaid\u2019s Tale <\/em>and eating Doritos while she slept against my chest. To be tired, nursing, to feel that walking around the block was a triumph, to delight in the tiny seashell toes of another human body that my own body had made \u2026 these were transformations past the horizon line of exhaustion. And on the other side, I was discovering another person. I am discovering another person in the midst of all this care. It\u2019s thrilling. It\u2019s terrifying. What am I scared of? Scared of repetition. Scared of messing it up. Scared of messing her up. Scared by the fact that I can\u2019t anticipate what the things are that will resonate through her psyche forever.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read Leslie Jamison\u2019s essay \u201cI Met Fear on the Hill\u201d in our winter 2018 issue.\u00a0<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Read Kaveh Akbar\u2019s poem \u201cMother I Once Was\u201d in our spring 2019 issue.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Kaveh Akbar\u2019s poems have appeared recently in\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0New<\/span>\u00a0Yorker<\/span>,<\/em> The Paris Review,<\/em> Poetry,<\/em>\u00a0t<\/em>he<\/em>\u00a0New<\/span>\u00a0York Times,<\/em>\u00a0the\u00a0<\/em>Nation,\u00a0and elsewhere. His first book is\u00a0<\/em>Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at\u00a0Purdue<\/span>\u00a0University and in the low-residency M.F.A. programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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