I’M NOT SURE I KNOW what it is to be “a good reader.” My way of reading is something I’ve had to contend with, shape, and revise over the course of my life, even day to day, really, and is the most fraught relationship I have with any side of myself, in part because for most of my life I’ve believed that voracious reading is good reading. And it’s exactly that voluminous experience of reading that hasn’t, since childhood, been available to me. Childhood was my era of ease and happiness with books. But in early adolescence this ease tapered off, and then, in my mid-twenties, it truly ended. When I’d begin to read, unless I had the external pressure of a class deadline, I’d nearly always fall asleep, something I’d later learn is one symptom of ADHD and which can sometimes be misdiagnosed as a form of narcolepsy. If I didn’t fall asleep, much of my reading was full of empty sky, that gauzy injury of blankness so common to the disorder.
I use the term disorder because for me it is an extremely painful condition, a disorder of my relationship to time itself. If a person cannot attend to something, how does she spend her time? How can time become full, and fulfilling? I could prepare for the poetry courses I taught, I could attend to my students’ writing, I could do all things required of me in my profession. Yet I’ve always been keenly aware that if I weren’t a teacher of literature’s miniatures, it could have been otherwise. Beyond my duties as a professor, I could hardly ever read. My mind often felt vacant, hungering, wrong, and guilty for lacking the voracity I wanted so badly, envying my friends and colleagues who could sink into books with delight, with relaxation.
But what is reading, anyway? And how did it funnel into this singular quantitative metric not just in my mind but in the minds of many others? Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading traces much of what can be known of reading’s wildly surprising past. It functions as a curio cabinet of reading’s manifestations across time and place, beginning in 4000 BCE “with the inscription of signs representing ten goats and sheep on a clay tablet.” Learning that ancient libraries were loud with reading—silent reading wasn’t the norm in the Western world until the tenth century, Manguel writes—opened for me the idea that reading behaves in many ways.
Manguel’s study of readers and reading began to fray the edges of my own pained concept of reading. With silent reading, Manguel says, “the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words,” which allowed “unwitnessed communication between the book and the reader.” The silent experience protected a reader from judgment or, worse, censorship by surrounding listeners. I like to think of the readers who first thought to try silent reading, what they wanted to preserve, what privacy they could then forge between themselves and their books. What intimacy.
Intimacy with a book (from the Latin intimus, “inmost”) arrives at the meeting of inmosts. Mine, the book’s. And what are my books? I see now, in writing this essay, that the problem before me—the possibility—is not just in widening my idea of reading but my idea of the book. I’ve talked about these things with my partner, Jess, and once on a spring walk when everything was beginning to bloom here in South Pasadena, I told him I thought my gift in this life was noticing nature. Some months later, when I had become particularly frustrated, dejected, really, by my lack of reading, he said he would rather be with someone who noticed the natural world than someone who had read every word of Shakespeare. I felt the Chinese elm hanging over my duplex relax in me. Galileo’s “book of nature” concerns the workings of the natural world, but intimacy with that book, even if verbalized, is so detailed, so intricate and multitudinous that no human could tally such noticings. And after that process of seeking—in conversation with others, or myself, or the natural world, which I believe has individuated animus—I want my psyche to land at the limit of knowledge, at mystery. The more we admit we do not know, the theologian Gordon Kaufman taught me, the more faithful we are.
Instead of responding to the giant pressure to read voraciously, I’d prefer to begin the latter portion of my life in relation to the inmost book that will never be printed, nor conveyed, nor fully legible even to me, a book each of us creates over our lifetime, inscribed with all we’ve read, noticed, intuited, felt, sensed, and made. The silence learned by ancient readers and by children today is the inmost book’s necessity, and is perhaps our first teacher in the unsayable, the impossibility of full transmission, relieving the desire to be fully known by another person, expanding the enormity of what each human contains, and is.
As a fraught reader of literal books, I’ve developed a habit of returning to beloved books more often than I open new ones, though I do work hard at the latter. A new book can feel a bit like a blind date: a stressful effort that’s likely to fail. Why not return to those places I know will capture, astonish, and transform me? My reading behavior is, then, marked by repetition.
Repetition, as a poetic technique, is one of the most ancient, appearing in the Egyptian Book of the Dead in roughly 1550 BCE. There, repetition is less a technique than a ship the souls of the dead use to navigate the afterlife, spells and rituals not for the living to recite over the dead but for the dead themselves to say. The ancient Egyptians didn’t say someone “had died”; they instead referred to death as “westing,” behaving like the setting sun, which resurrects at dawn. On that journey, the spells of this book would be of paramount importance, its repetitions activating guidance. As one who grew up in a Norwegian Lutheran tradition, such a book could not be more foreign to my mind, but thinking on it now, I find it achingly tender, this last gift buried with a beloved.
When I teach the craft of repetition, I tell my students that what’s repeated is only exact repetition on the literal plane. A repeated syllable, sound, line, or stanza bears the imprint of what has occurred between its first and second use. Repetition is sameness transformed, which might mean there is no such thing as literal repetition, at least not at these depths. Rituals—whether religious or not—are repetitions, of course, and repetition prepares our neurology for the arrival of something meaningful. My return to books is a ritual, then, and these books occupy a particular shelf in my home, where even to gaze upon them is a form of friendship.
One of these books is Brenda Hillman’s Death Tractates, an elegy written for and toward a lost mentor and friend whose name is unspoken in the book. In the poem “Seated Bride,” Hillman writes:
She had died without warning in early spring.
Which seemed right.
Now that which was far off could become intimate.
I said to the guides, let’s stand
very close to the mystery
and see how far she’s gone
Hillman has written a beautifully generous essay called “The Trance Method” explaining her writing process, which in turn unlocks the language of “the guides”:
For over three decades, my poetry has engaged with trance methods and transpersonal therapy. To my mind, poetic language and investigation can act as a shuttle between an intense inner psycho-spiritual work & certain more political and environmental concerns. I’ve sometimes been dismayed at the way these things are isolated if writers insist on a disconnection between the intensely subjective work we do as artists, and the outer work of our social & political lives. These things cannot be separated. I hope for a radical practice of the everyday. Inner work, art-as-link, outer work—that is the triangle. The mysterious force of poetry brings this geometry into alignment. In this tripartite practice, the figure can be balanced on any of its points.
I’ve taught Death Tractates twice in the last three years, the first time unaware not just of Hillman’s method but of similar methods common in shamanism, where on trance-state journeys shamans can encounter guides—animals, teachers such as Buddha, Isis, Muhammad, or Jesus, ancestral selves, ancestors, and myriad other forms of soul guides—who respond to their articulated intent for the journey. My first experience of Death Tractates, then, translated such passages metaphorically; the “guides” of this poem weren’t spiritual entities but the poet’s interiority given a storyline with characters. This year, after immersing myself in a study of shamanism (by audiobook), my second encounter with Hillman was blown open with a revelatory O!: “Let go said the so-called / What. / Let go said everything” (from “Split Tractate”).
“What,” in Death Tractates, is, I think, the unsayable, the wall against which the limit of our knowing leans. I don’t feel, anymore, this wall as a source of angst. My religious angst, present in the panic of my first book, Deposition, was fitful precisely because my inherited religion “overknew,” as it were, or acted as if it did. If I could counsel my younger self, it would be toward Hillman’s “What,” the unsayable that paradoxically does, I think, have some things to say, should we decide to practice the art of all that can be read—the daydream, the nightdream, the synchronicities, the conversations, the music, the scent of the beloved, the voice over the wire, nature, the drawing, the dinner, the laughing—and all that cannot.
Coda
When she had just started being dead I called to her.
Plum trees were waiting to be entered,
the swirling way they have,
each a shower of
What.
Each one full of hope,
and of the repetitions—————-—from “First Tractate”
————-—Brenda Hilllman, circa 1989
Katie Ford’s most recent book is If You Have to Go (Graywolf). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and the Norton Introduction to Literature and is forthcoming from The Atlantic. She teaches at UC Riverside.
