Learning to Unlayer

Nox is not a book. It is an experience. Anne Carson's box, published accordion style, is the result of her attempt to translate an Ancient Greek work by Castullus and it's collision with the discovery of her own brother's death. The box itself, and notice I won't ever quite call it a book, is a essentially a color scan of a notebook containing collaged elements of her brother's life, the process of poem translation, her own reflections, and other artifacts. Here, Carson attempts not only to create a work commenting on the mourning process, but seeks to recreate the mourning process for her audience.

At first encounter with the box of emotions that is Nox, I wasn't quite sure how to go about looking at it. I opened the box, set it on the floor, grabbed the first page and stood up. The pages fell away from me in a zigzag, and I stood simply looking at the unfolded pieces head at a 90 degree angle, creating a cramp in my neck that still hasn't quite gone away. Then I refolded the whole thing carefully, swept and mopped my floors, and spread it out. I unfolded a series of pages, and then recreased at specific points to bring certain sections closer together. I found myself drawn to the short, one line poem-like-things that punctuated the book, so I tried to pair them with images, definitions, or reflections that gave them more meaning to me.

In short, the box was a process of connecting and creating meaning, not a reading. As I explored Carson's mourning period, I began to recognize my own mourning process through the way I dealt with the box: First I try to look at the whole damn thing at an awkward angle, then I do a little bit of cleaning, then I move laterally while pulling certain things together. This is interesting, but not necessarily definitive. I decided that I wanted to make it definitive. So I began to give the box to my friends, one by one, without explanation, and watch the way they encountered it.

Some of them took one look at the box and began to clean, realizing that this was sure to be a messy endeavor. Some of them skipped the cleaning and opened it straight away, draping the length of the box across piles of clothes, furniture, text books, realizing that the mess would come whether they were prepared or not. Some chose to simply not unfold, reading it much like a chapbook by flipping folded pages. Half of them read and asked me questions about the text, the other half simply glanced and exclaimed over the staples, folds, crumples, and erasure marks.

This is, of course, a giant metaphor for the unique way in which we all experience loss. There isn't one way to mourn, isn't a definitive answer to the steps we should take to reach a conclusion for that loss. Carson recognized the limitations of the classical chapbook form: it virtually requires the audience to start at a beginning and end at an end. That isn't life, that isn't death, and that certainly isn't mourning.

So this is what I got out of reading this box: a message doesn't have to be written in text. As a writer, I should make sure that the text helps to create the message, as Carson did with her rumination on history and mourning and not knowing how to loose someone you had already lost. But I should also make sure that the experience is just as representative of the message, if not moreso. I have begun, already, to play with the structure of my recent pieces and hand them to people without comment, allowing me to watch and understand the way they experience the text as something that impacts what they get out of it. Rejecting form does not necessarily mean confusion or chaos (but it can, if that's what you want) but rather the freedom to individualize the response which is a message in and of itself.