Margins, I find, are the soulmates of fragments, defining the edges and elements of the whole, present and critical. They are parts of the sum – out of central view yet discernible.
Specimens, remnants, and notions – sundries, or seemingly insignificant objects. Notebooks, portfolios, scrapbooks. There is a meta sense to these words as synonymous or sub-categories of fragment.
In her book “Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel,” Shahnaz Habib, a native of India, writes about how privileged travelers – Western, mostly white – subconsciously view themselves while traveling in Third World lands. (Habib embraces the term “Third World” in a perceptive closing essay, pushing aside “postcolonial” and “developing” and other “acceptable” terms. She writes: “If we were being absolutely honest, wouldn’t we just call it the exploited world? Still – the irresistible knowingness of ‘Third World.’ How extra it is. How it propels you beyond primaries and binaries. The audacity of its unwieldy internal rhyme. Its elasticity that has made space for so many meanings ...”)
By invoking negative space Habib gets at margins and fragments via her First World travelers’ psychological assessment, noting that “We are primed to think of lack of privilege as a deficit. And of course it is that, in many bit and small ways dictated by structural inequalities. But the more we think of it as a hole, the less whole we become. It is as if there are privilege-shaped holes in our selves – here is the hole where your straight privilege should be …” further citing male, able, and class privilege “… here, here, here, and so on until some of us are mostly made of holes …
“What is a margin, after all? From the point of view of the center, the margin is a faraway thing; it is where a space ends. And so the margin of one space is always the center of two different spaces. The margin, the border, the periphery is the line along which spaces and peoples and things meet and mix. The margin begs from the center and borrows from next door and steals from itself. The margin is where the self gets to know itself.” (Habib writes of making pilgrimage to the Turkish town where the Sufi poet Rumi lived and worked, and her reasoning here is truly Rumi-nescent of his poetry, with lines such as “I’ve heard of living at the center, but what about leaving the center of the center?”)
^^^
I came late in life to Richard Brautigan’s quixotic novella “Trout Fishing In America,” a work that is disjointed – not necessarily a bad thing – in that reading it is like trying to fold a road map the wrong way. (As it happens, I read it in the same week I watched the 1981 film “Escape From New York.” The book and film have little to do with each other, but do share antiestablishment satire, and are cultural touchpoints of my early youth and early adulthood, respectively: a book and a film that I have been aware of for decades but never took the time to read and to watch – until age 67.)
“TFIA” is defined by a particular fragmented quality. Reading it you just have to go with the pinball-bumper parade of Brautigan’s uncanny nonsequiturs and moments of magical realism, the two elements sometimes feeling interchangeable. Phrases exist such as “giraffe races at Kilimanjaro,” and “the glass whiskers of the houses,” and a recurring theme is that “trout should never drink port wine.”
“Their markers were small boards that looked like the heels of stale bread,” Brautigan describes the headstones in “the cemetery for the poor … whereas the well-to-do would have their names for a long time written on marble hors d’oeuvre like horses trotting up the fancy paths to the sky ...”
These are images that have nothing, and everything, to do with each other. One of my favorite passages refers to the flowers left in fruit jars and tin cans at some of the graves:
“I had a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering dry grass and fruit jars and tin cans and the markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and trying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star.”
Fantastic imagery and nonsequiturs:
“This is a beautiful creek,” says one character. “It reminds me of Evangeline’s hearing aid.”
“’The dishes can wait,’ he said to me. Bertrand Russell could not say it any better.”
“When the jar was full he shut off the faucet with a sudden but delicate motion like a famous brain surgeon removing a delicate part of the imagination.”
In the chapter “The Ballet for Trout Fishing In America,” we learn that “the main energy for the ballet comes from a description of the Cobra Lily. The description could be used as a welcome mat on the front porch of hell or to conduct an orchestra of mortuaries with ice-cold woodwinds or to be an atomic mailman in the pines, in the pines where the sun never shines.”
In the chapter “Tom Martin Creek,” Brautigan puts forth a fascinating concept: “It is good to name creeks after people and then later to follow them for awhile seeing what they have to offer what they know and have made of themselves.” He could mean the creek, or the person, or both. It’s interchangeable.
Contradiction meets cohesion in “I was sitting on a stool in the bookstore one afternoon reading a book that was in the shape of a chalice. The book had clear pages like gin …”
Literature is the cup we drink from and the contents may vary.
-- N.R.