Jay Kirk's new book Avoid the Day carries the subtitle A New Nonfiction in Two Movements, and if you're wondering A new nonfiction what?, join the club. Is it memoir, travel narrative, exploration of the collective unconscious through myth, or frenzied fever dream? Maybe all of the above?
If nothing else it's entertaining, except when it isn't, and here I'm referring to large chunks of the second movement when Kirk immerses us in an attempt to film a horror movie while on a ship exploring the Arctic. It's a deep dive into his personal neuroses involving visions of a muddy hole, a fire-hungry father, and a menacing dentist, and if you're giving away free tickets for that particular cruise, count me out.
The first movement is more fun, when Kirk seeks a lost manuscript of a Bartok quartet. Kirk retraces Bartok's travels through Transylvania, where the composer recorded folk music on wax cylinders and where Kirk's digital recorder breaks down when he needs it most. He draws a connection between Bartok's recordings and his own writing: "His whole method relied on this advantage: to go out into the world, collect bits of direct experience, make faithful transcriptions, then feed it to his inner gargoyle."
The problem, however, is that Kirk's inner gargoyle can be a pretty unpleasant creature, and he swiftly loses faith in his ability to gather "bits of direct experience" because everything he experiences becomes weighed down with meaning and morphed into something indirect and inauthentic and inaccessible, until he admits "an acute allergy to experience itself":
I had long suspected that my instruments for recording these experiences were little more reliable than a Xerox on the fritz. Mine maybe more than others. Memory being, of course, the defective machine spitting out its trickster distortions. The original memo--if there ever really had been one--was lost. The problem, no doubt, was that I had given myself over to thinking too much about the idea of experience.
Throughout his travels in Eastern Europe and the Arctic, he perceives experience through a scrim of myth and memory in a frantic search for meaning constantly derailed by rabbit trails splitting off and joining up again until everything seems connected in one massive labyrinth. During aforay into connections between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Virgil's Aeneid, and Egyptian myth, he finds "A bird-faced god sinking into the underworld in a boat. Everything entrapped by symbol, a sign to look elsewhere, to something not itself, the eternal spasmodic deferral of meaning."
Kirk himself can't resist making such connections, multiplying clever similes as in this description of icebergs encountered on his Arctic expedition: "Slabs tilted like massive white piano lids, cracked and split, as if we'd crashed into a piano factory....Out the window the passing ice fields look like thousands of unhinged white doors. Like a torn-up suicide note shakily reglued. Like the ruins of the sun." The comparisons are playful and visual, but they also gain resonance in context, where Kirk has been obsessing over the impact of ever-present Arctic sunshine, the role of the sun in various myth systems, the presence of music in the the hum of existence, and the lure of suicide, which would allow him to escape from "the eternal horror show of connectivity. The never-ending hum of the pattern machine."
Dead men tell no tales so I'm probably not spoiling the plot by revealing that in the end he does not kill himself, but after his bizarre and baroque explorations of myth, memory, and experience, he finds himself suspended between wheeling birds and the underworld, hovering over "The still blue hole. Like a pulsing orb at the center of this dark wheel of noise." And while parts of the book may be unpleasant, Kirk's willingness to drill beneath the surface and let us see the orb and hear the hum make Avoid the Day a trip worth taking. Just be sure to take along your seasick pills and a warm blanket.
No comments:
Post a Comment