On a Paragraph of Christina Tudor-Sideri’s in Schism Blue
p.45
Christina Tudor-Sideri’s books are unlike almost anything currently being written. Is this because she is not writing in her mother tongue, à la Samuel Beckett? She says it best herself: “I don’t know how to write characters. Rather, I don’t know how to write their stories. But I know how to write about what they are feeling.” This is a sort of inside-out characterization that chimes with something Guy Davenport wrote of Eudora Welty: “Miss Welty…seeing her stories…always perforce inside outwards, does not realize the extent she has kept the contours and symbols of Ovid…that we can see from the outside looking in.” As people look from the outside in, they might trip on certain words, certain obsessions in approaching her fiction, her essays. Schism Blue, a work descending from Edvard Munch’s journals, does not take a straight line to the heart of the messy emotions filling every day of our lives. What might have seemed settled is only beginning to simmer and what seemingly takes a backseat is more akin to the prime lights — one of the two characters is dead and one will die, but time is constantly in flux. The phrase “body of work” is apropos and though that phrase doesn’t figure in this passage, it has been traced before and keeps coming back in this section (of which this is the first paragraph) like a leitmotif.
This first paragraph sets the undertone for the rest of the nineteen-page section — the physicalness of these certain words and obsessions, with a number of musical flourishes: “impalpable otherness”; “ever-growingly” a rarity; “ridicule with tenderness the soul”; “nurture the heart into growing another heart.” This paragraph works on the female character’s body as a guru masseuse might — no hands, all heart. Something is being impregnated but not the ova — “Until her body is abundant in these little organs like streets in cobblestones” (and one may think of certain paintings by Klimt or Schiele) yet it seems she has taken what the man has said to her (and he is older, he has passed on many ideas to her) and mixed them with her own readings and writings as she “walk[s] not toward but away from one’s heart.” Where/how do these words lead? The feet are walking away from the heart but is the heart part of the body? Metaphors lay heavy all around like fractured faults in limestone cliffs, but these are cobblestones, the organs more firm (and one could think of Deleuze). The body is in the streets and walking away from what lies in the body (the organs) — this is life at many cross-purposes. It sounds like the way not to live but don’t we all sometimes experience such slipperiness of emotion? “I know how to write about what they are feeling.” Emotion is character — an upside down phrase to stress the unperpendicular relations that fiction should embrace. With a more poetical circumspection, Keats’s negative capability, and the clear knife (pen) of an Ingeborg Bachmann, Tudor-Sideri etches the impossibilities in emotion and all its essences. Isn’t this what we do? we walk to get out of the head but also out of the body, to give it something to do — so it doesn’t feel things too keenly? A walk makes one feel better about oneself, usually.
The paragraph’s chiasmatic motion leads me to better understand why the narrator deems the reason for imploring death between them was “to honor and caress and ridicule with tenderness the wound and the discourse of assurance.” This can be another poetic way of saying “we honor death to an extent, but we won’t let assurance run rampant about its reality.” To ridicule is the one part of the three parts’ action that is most needed. The sentences continue into something almost sci-fi, but more metaphysically drawn — the characters are to “nuture the heart into growing another heart.” Here is a land of doubles, of the Other — a being or entity, so mentioned often in the book. Can the female character live with all these organs? Hence the walk atop the physical earth, the “formation[s] the feet might encounter on the path away from what lies inside the body.” Spirit passing? Again we return to this end point of the passage — the body walking away from the heart for in that action, our relationships with self and others shatter, as they try to become something else — a pain-free thought can only be produced by us via pain, the witchy word that will and does rear up for both these characters.
It’s enough to say Tudor-Sideri’s sentences take place in a kind of Tarkovskian slow-motion, the looks and shifting of the eyes of the characters like the turn of words in the sentences. But she doesn’t write scenes, she writes as Gerhardt Richter might take his homemade squeegee and squeeze, smush, and streak color back and forth over the canvas of the page so that the blue, green, and gray of the early parts (and of the Munch painting “The Lonely Ones” that lives inside, the painting on the front and back covers bookending the pages) give way to reds and more complicated blues: “Behind the blue there are red houses like lovers motionless in the swaying embrace of time, isolated, unfathomable; red houses like the fruits of a forthcoming…” There is something of Tarkovsky here, too — his swaying slow-motion and even the motion-picture color (and black & white) of the sort used in his 1974 film, The Mirror, comes to life and I also intuit the man himself overlooking a miniature for The Sacrifice
as Tudor-Sideri/the narrator overlooks the novel. Some might cite Blanchot’s novels, but I sight films and paintings in Tudor-Sider’s prose — a greater, more fulsome world than the Dubliners short stories’ templates or stage craft of simple declarative sentences trying to seem cool — patchy prose that wants to be envied because it is “in.”
When we read for the lustres, as Emerson counsels — and he continues: “…as if one should use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment, for its rich colors. ’Tis not Proclus, but a piece of nature and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to see the author’s author, than himself” (“Nominalist and Realist”) — we set up an unique relationship, as we try to annex that author’s author in some gracious manner. The “author’s author,” like Proust’s “innermost self” of the author, or as William Gaddis’s “compositional self,” the one who does the real work, the rewriting and crossing out to get it right, is the true force forever in nightshade — it’s what a writer will try not to summon in interviews or try in vain, because it’s only there when you can’t see it, when you aren’t aware of what it is producing. Tudor-Sideri has, like T.S. Eliot writes, succeeded grandly in the mysticism of art; those lustres that are not apparent to the many:
Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Her words do reach a stillness although they are extruded each one from the last — one has to pause and ask, Where am I? Where are we? There are many levels to this land which also contains an overworld and an underworld. She has built a monument to death and to the body and to time in her over and readers will have to reconcile themselves with her eerie but emotional prose — “book[s] whose source is art ha[ve] no guarantee in the world” as Blanchot wrote — for it is a world rich in contours and symbols of her unconscious, whether the harmonies of Bach, the colors and lines of Munch, or those unfathomable long takes of Tarkovsky that begin in one time period and end in another dimension.
