the symphony begins in the depths
on the multiplication of the self and their tendency to confess
A while ago the lit twitter Discourse prompted me to say grumpily to my phone: “If I read the word ‘autofiction’ one more ‘gain.” I didn’t care about the article that prompted said Discourse just as I didn’t care about the story that prompted the article. But in the moment, I did think of Rimbaud’s oft-quoted statement “Je est un autre.” and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Naturally, this statement’s own downfall is its very quotability. But it’s a mood.
I know the particular feeling of being made a palimpsest of one’s work intimately, just as other Black people, Black women, and Black poets do. It was so frustrating when I first began writing and was constantly conflated with my speakers. It’s not entirely everyone’s fault. My profuse use of the “I” is, perhaps, misleading. But that dangerous big “I” is in fact another.
My speakers aren’t simulacra of myself, and they’re not a vehicle for Me The Person in any psychoanalytic sense. As much as the disembodied voices of my poems might sound like me, or share qualities of mine, they live their own lives in their own (fictional) realm. Yes, traces of my own subconscious exist in my work but they are the subway system and the poem is the grid plan. That’s oversimplified and not right. I can’t quite get at it.
Rimbaud’s quote has been variously translated as I is another and “I” is another which create two radically different effects. In the first, the speaker and the I contained within the phrase are one. In the second, the I within the quotations and the speaking I are bifurcated, distinct. Even if a part of a larger whole. And of course, the second carries a playful density and ironic smirk that feels more characteristically Rimbaud.
Once I began to embrace a similar multiplication of selves I felt like a more honest poet. The trickery of slipping in and out of them felt natural. It occurred to me: of course my selves are multiple; I’ve been codeswitching my entire life. The delineations between myselves and my poems are blurry because they aren’t me but they’re of me, which makes them sort of me, a little.
I love John Berryman’s aggressive denunciation of the designation “confessional.” In a 1970 interview Peter A. Stitt asks how he reacts to the label. He says,
With rage and contempt! Next question.
When Stitt prompts him to expound, asking “Are the sonnets confessional?” Berryman offers:
Well, they're about her and me. I don't know. The word doesn't mean anything. I understand the confessional to be a place where you go and talk with a priest. I personally haven't been to confession since I was twelve years old.
The confessional isn’t an adjective. It’s a place. It’s a speech act. It’s public and intensely private. It isn’t merely a projection of the self. For me, the confessional is not an act of transposing but of composing.
The aforementioned danger of Rimbaud’s quotability is that the majority of the statement always gets left off. He continues:
If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.
If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!
I take this to mean many things— the communication between the self and the self may be involuntary. Maybe they move like dominoes. Though they are deeply connected they are discrete parts. Further, a self has the capability of existing outside another, a sort of conscious dissociation. And, one self potentially has dominion over another— can start the chain of events. Can control the tempo, the dynamics, the stop and start. The Self is an invention and poems cannot rest on it alone. Yes, lowercase s selves are there always, unavoidably ebbing, but psychoanalysis of the artist is the easy out and the worst window in.
I would be interested to revisit what the designation “Confessional” means at present, when everywhere is a place you go and talk with a priest. When the Discourse around autofiction happens wedged between tweets about people’s deepest feelings, thoughts, and personal business. Is it harder now than ever for us to compartmentalize what we know about people’s lives and their work? Was it ever easy? I wonder if people who have been made palimpsest, whose selves have often been collapsed into one against their will, are more adept at creating the mental boundaries required to engage with work outside of the artist’s Self, outside of their own Self. Perhaps. Maybe that’s an unfair judgment. In any case, what I love so much about Rimbaud’s Surrealism and Berryman’s Confessional, is that the poet (despite the degree to which they have been fashioned into capital s Selves posthumously) is merely conduit, interlocutor. The Dream Songs execute this rather literally. Rimbaud and Berryman allow the disjointed and disembodied voices of their selves and others to remain somewhere in the ether— not relegated to an ego or a body or a Self.
There’s an absolutely incredible video of Roger Troutman on Video Soul talking about Zapp’s iconic use of the talkbox. There’s a moment when, in response to being asked what he’ll do when the talkbox goes out of style (haha) he sings with the talkbox half in his mouth and half with his own pure voice and says Maybe I’ll put em both together like this. That’ll be a whole new sound, see.
Maybe, above all, it’s more like that.