Blurry Beginnings

While I was in Cambridge over this last week to teach in the Lesley MFA program, I went to an alumni reading one afternoon. When one of the last readers was called from the list, he stood up from his seat at the back of the room and he began to recite his poem as he came down the banked steps toward the podium. He skipped the moment of getting settled in front of the crowd, that space a performer takes to transition from seated audience member to next up. It’s a bold move, a dramatic choice, and it made me sit up and take notice.

It made me think about a student I knew years ago at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a mesmerizing performance artist I’ll call C. Lately, I’ve been returning to memories of my time in art school, seeing all kinds of lessons from that part of my past that apply to my current writing and teaching life. And watching that poet start his poem on his way down to the microphone put me right back in the performance space at SAIC more than thirty years ago.

Back then, I was sitting in the audience watching a few performance artists present their work. C stood up and began to rearrange the chairs in the space. She was the next student scheduled to perform and while the people in the room began to talk after the previous performer had finished, she glided around us, setting up the seats. I caught her out of the corner of my eye and realized she looked different. Her posture had changed, her movements became more choreographed, more graceful. There was the sense that she was acting out a concern over where the chairs would go although she said nothing. It became so clear that she was starting her piece, without a single sound or signal, that the audience took their seats and quieted down as if we’d been asked to do so. I don’t remember much about the actual performance but I remember being intrigued by the way she silently commanded the room, blurred the line that marked the start of her performance. To have that kind of control was incredible but also to think of starting without any kind of announcement or line marking that start seemed very smart to me.

Both of these experiences made me think of the opening of Carmen Maria Machado’s brilliant book In the Dream House. I used this book in a seminar I taught this week and one thing that strikes me about the beginning of the book is that there is this sense of not being entirely sure when the story starts. It’s part of the book’s magic for me.

It begins with a dedication that reads, “If you need this book, then it is for you.” This is followed by three quotes on three pages, then the title page, then a short passage titled, “Dream House as Overture,” which reads, “ I never read prologues. I find them tedious. If what the author has to say is so important, why relegate it to the paratext? What are they trying to hide?”

This is followed by the next section, titled, “Dream House as Prologue.” Machado talks about architecture (“I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors”) and the idea of telling an impossible story and the lack of literature based on domestic violence within same sex relationships, among other things. All beautifully written pages, talking about the book and what it is or isn’t, what it might be or might not be. It is not until page ten that I feel clear in my mind that a story is being introduced. It is on page ten when Machado writes, “Before I met the woman in the Dream House, I lived in a tiny two-bedroom in Iowa City.” At last, I am sure that I have entered the story and I am eager to swim inside the details.

(The above photo is Carmen Maria Machado and may be my favorite author photo of all time.)

I’ve been thinking about how we begin as artists, how we welcome our audience or our reader into the art we are making, the hard and fast line or the border we usually create to accomplish this and how interesting it can be to play with that, to blur it, to begin before the beginning. I love the feeling of accidentally drifting into a story or a performance and being almost caught in the trap of the piece, finding myself completely submerged before I recognize that I have been pulled in.

Are there other examples that come to mind? Is there anyone reading this who has experimented with their own beginnings in this way? I would love to hear about it.

Thank you, as always, for reading.