ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
12.1
12.1
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Kathryn Nuernberger
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1.
I have been searching everywhere for something I cannot name. I have been searching for its name. Understanding, perhaps it is called? Or connection? Or maybe I mean belonging? Every morning I open my notebook and search again. 2. I was asked to write a craft essay about research for a textbook. Instead, by accident, I wrote about ritual. The essay was very confusing. To the editors. And to me. I had just given birth to twins and was, on good days, only sleeping in 45-minute increments. I was having trouble making sense. I was not completing my sentences. What was I even talking about? 3. My great-uncle and I used to take walks every Friday morning. We didn’t meet until I was almost forty and he was over eighty. When we met, it felt like we’d been looking for each other our whole lives. His relationship with our family was complicated by the fact that he left for seminary when he was twelve, left the priesthood in his thirties. If you asked him about being a priest, he would tell you it was very lonely and no one in his order appreciated Thomas Merton. My relationship with our family was also complicated, because I like to be lonely, had no use for the Catholic church, and could talk all day about Thomas Merton. 4. I made a little list of research projects I’ve embarked on. I made a little list of rituals I have practiced. The craft essay I was failing to write was supposed to have a writing prompt.
5. I am often annoyed by the hubris of a craft essay. What do I know? What do I know of you and what you might need? I made a list of other writers who taught me how to research. Let’s talk to them and about them instead:
I research in archives, in the field, beneath the covers of my own dreams until something extraordinary flashes and I think, I have to tell someone about this. Or, If you knew about this, you and I and the world would be transformed. What should you be looking for in your own daily research practice, you might wonder. Surely not an answer or an argument or a claim—leave that to the critics, historians, and scientists. You are looking for a light sent up from the dead, a glimpse of yourself in the face of a stranger on an escalator, a way to welcome into your own mind some other person’s dreams. 6. I show these early transmissions of such extraordinary flashes of research to those friends who want to know me and who I very much want to be known by. Usually, they say my awestricken wonder is boring. And so revision becomes part of the ritual too. With each poem or essay I learn again that I must surround the beautiful gleaming fact that called out to me with myself. I write in my hungers and fears. I add a line wondering whether we all die for nothing, or worse, for something that I am completely missing. I come to understand my list of the ways a narwhal’s tusk has been used is tied to the mystery of my long nights nursing this brand-new child who, I realize as milk trickles out of me, will someday watch me die, or, God forbid, something worse. I cannot stop listing the somethings worse as the baby suckles. The narwhal’s tusk is a tooth. Queen Elizabeth wielded one as a scepter. They migrate as far into the arctic ice as they can go, looking for perfectly silent waters. Fact by fact, I come to understand that the feeling of learning something remarkable is a refuge from all in this life that cannot be understood. A reader will feel wonder when they read a work, not through the fact that inspired it, but through the feeling of coming to know another person via that fact. Writing is a ritual of letting beloved strangers into the archive of one’s mind to dig around for meaning. 7. Once in an AWP conference keynote address, Toi Derricotte said she starts each day writing a haiku and an intention. She said we should all try this for a year and see how our lives would change. She promised we would be transformed. Though that seemed too woo-woo for me to believe, in my 42nd year I made this my ritual practice. By the end of the year I had given birth to twins and become the chair of an English department. In my 43rd year, when there was hardly a moment when I didn’t have a baby in my arms or an email on my machine, I borrowed a practice I learned from Sei Shōnagon, one of the few women in the canon of ancient Japanese literature, who made lists and brief diary entries about domesticity and the small world of courtly life around her. List of things that make pleasing shadows, I wrote at the top of a page with my free hand. Sounds that make a baby cry, I wrote on another. Things I have seen in the alley while holding a baby to the window. This was all the research I could find time and energy to muster. Sometimes my great uncle came over and held a sleeping baby for awhile. Or he would lay down on the floor mat beside them and sing lines from songs I remember my grandmother singing to me. I would slip upstairs and try to keep my eyes open long enough to write with both hands. Things I could suggest in a craft essay. 8. One of the last times I saw my grandma I was with my great uncle. It had been years since I’d been able to have a real conversation with her, but her brother knew how to peel back the layers of dementia. They sang a song from their teenage years, grandma told a dirty joke about tits and tassels that had him rolling with laughter. They remembered being children stealing Damson plums from a neighbor's tree and getting sick eating so many. To write this essay I read everything I could find about plum stones found in archaeological ruins from thousands of years ago. There are little rhymes about plums in a cursive I can barely read between the pages of old herbariums. Tolstoy wrote such a sweet story about little Vanya and the stolen plum. I looked up recipes of sliwowicka and wondered if my dear old people would think I was silly to try to make the Polish plum brandy their parents forgot. 9. As he was dying, my uncle gave me a chalice he’d received from his mother and his aunts as a young man. A chalice he would use as a crucial part of the rituals of the Catholic mass. I keep the chalice on my desk beside the computer where I write these notes. With that chalice my uncle also gave me a yellow post-it note with the names of his grandmother, great-grandmother, and some aunts written in a trembling hand. He had trouble explaining the reason for giving this list to me, but I understand the gift. There was a final name that he couldn’t seem to finish writing. He fluttered his hand in the air as he reached for something he could not manage to grasp. I wondered if it was meant to be Estelle, his mother, or Margaret, my grandmother, or maybe my own name. When I look at that final dash, it feels as if we are all there. 10. For a time, an infant has a reflex that makes it very hard for them to unwind their fingers and let something they have grabbed hold of go. They study it with their hands and their mouths and eerily huge eyes, until at last, this small corner of their world finally makes a kind of sense. Only then can they release their grip. Only then is their research complete. Until they grab hold again and begin their search for understanding once more. |
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Kathryn Nuernberger's latest book is HELD: Essays in Belonging. She is also the author of the poetry collections, RUE, The End of Pink, and Rag & Bone. Her other essay collections are The Witch of Eye and Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. Her awards include the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an NEA fellowship, and “notable” essays in the Best American series. Her co-authored textbook with Maya Jewell Zeller is Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. She teaches in the MFA program at University of Minnesota.
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