Peggy Shinner's "The Rupture," featured in the new Ocean State Review

PEGGY SHINNER’S “THE RUPTURE,” FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW

The Rupture

I have long bristled at the suggestion that writing is therapy, and have secretly and now not so secretly, distanced myself from that notion. Writing is work, or the attempt to make work into literature, while therapy is the attempt to banish unhappiness, or at least understand it. Writing, in fact, can be a lifelong commitment to unhappiness, or to quote Philip Roth, writing is frustration…not to mention humiliation. Charles D’Ambrosio, when asked about confessional writing, held it accountable to the demands of language…. [T]he truth of writing…inevitably takes you away from the merely heartfelt….In a way, writing maps a path out of the self.

When my computer was stolen fifteen months ago, along with my back-up hard drive and flash drive—the hard drive was plugged into my computer which was slipped into my backpack sitting on the floor next to my desk (to make for easy transport), and the flash drive was, incidentally, in the backpack—the book I’d been working on was gone. In the days that followed, well-meaning friends, acquaintances, and strangers asked me if I was going to write about it or urged me to. A few dispensed with any hint of suggestion and went straight to the imperative: Write about it! One individual, getting swept up in the drama, said the theft was now part of the story, of what happens to the thief when s/he reads your manuscript… All this sounded almost gleeful, as if a great opportunity awaited me; as if horror would eventually transmute to something like pleasure; as if, delving into the well-known trough/trope of loss and despair, I’d come up with the requisite saving insights, and have a new project to boot.

I did not write about it. I had no desire to write about it. What happened to me and Ann was commonplace and uninteresting. (Ann’s computer was stolen too, but her hard drive, not plugged in, was left behind. Therefore, she had back-ups of all her work.) What could be said about it that, despairingly and maudlinly, hadn’t been said before? Why me? somebody might have cried. Why not? Ann and I retorted when it was our turn. Perhaps more to the point, I didn’t want to be confined to a narrative of trauma. In that narrative, there’s pain, defiance, redemption; or there’s pain, and more pain. My on-going project had been of a different order. I’d wanted to shed the self, or set it aside, so that it became, as D’Ambrosio put it, an angle of vision, a complicating factor, almost impersonal. You must be so angry, friends said. But I wasn’t angry. Somehow my mental processes by-passed the perpetrators, towards whom I might have felt angry, and I hardly thought of them. Instead I was irrationally angry at everyone else. I was angry at Ann, who was suffering but to a lesser extent. The book I’d been working on was gone.

People were, all at once, generous, comforting, off-key, and slyly castigating. Soup in particular was the universal cure-all delivered to our door. Squash soup, potato soup, tomato. Bucatini all’Amatriciana, zucchini bread, brownies, flowers, wine. There were tips for moving forward: [S]it down and do an outline from what you remember while it’s still fresh….you can fill it in later as you think of things. Read the introduction to William Gass’s “Omensetter’s Luck”… in which he describes how his first novel, which he worked on for nearly a decade, was stolen by a colleague and sold to a publisher under the colleague’s name. My dear friend, xxxx, who died this year, wrote a book on secrets. If you’d like to know of it, let me know. Begin again, whatever that means—and looking back: We SHOULD remember to print out our story/novel every day or so. Even though we’d have to retype it all again into our computer—if our work was stolen—at the least we’d still possess our months and years of creativity in hard copy. More than once I was reminded of Maxine Hong Kingston, who’d lost a book manuscript in a fire; Amy Tan, who allegedly experienced the same, only I suspect the consoler was confusing Tan with Kingston, both Chinese-Americans; Nabokov, who would write a novel and then put it in a safe, and write it again without referring to what he had.

How can I help? my mentor asked from many states away. Time to glean.

I knew what glean meant but what did he mean? Glean, to gather or pick up ears of corn that have been left by the reapers. [H]ow much has yet to be gleaned off this stony field. You’ll get through this hard time, he’d once said years ago, as we walked on the edge of a prairie—a hard time about which I have no lasting memory—and then there will be another, he added, and in that moment, with the goldenrod turning to seed and the wind cutting our faces, I saw that time would be relentless and also that it would pass.

I had a notebook I’d bought in Paris: translucent glassine wrapper, pale gray belly band, stitched binding, lined pages. 5 ¾” x 8 ¼”. It’s called a Midori Notebook, made from Midori Diary paper, a high quality, durable paper, in Japan. Three days after the robbery I opened it. On the flyleaf there was an empty rectangle with two lines. I wrote the date of the robbery on one and, heavy-handedly, AFTER, on the other. I considered whether this would limit the use of the notebook, if, with that designation, it would always be tied to the robbery, but since I was now inextricably tied to the robbery I could provide no coherent answer. I suppose I wanted something inaugural. What would the new era augur? There was, no doubt, the whiff of the dramatic as well. What good is calamity if you can’t make a little drama out of it? On the first page I wrote: As punishment for her rapaciousness, they padlocked her ear. Captain Cook and his men, during their expeditions through Polynesia, regularly bestowed trinkets upon native women, often in exchange for the performance of an indecent denudation. One woman, it seems, was unduly acquisitive—rapacious one account called her—and when she begged, ceaselessly, for the intriguing little padlock a man held in his hand, he attached it to her ear to silence her. On the second page: Perhaps they had wanted to padlock her mouth. On the third, Hilton Als: Language is confusing, anyway: do we ever really say what we mean, let alone write it? Also on the third: I have been writing a book about shame.

I had been writing a book about shame. I had been writing it for three years. Als again: Who among us hasn’t wanted to apologize for his presence? Who among us has not wanted to crawl into a hole, fall through the floor, escape, hide, disappear? Shame suffuses the face with heat and makes you want to die. How could a thing that felt so bad be so interesting? I was not repelled by its hold but drawn to it. The book was a 230+ page document, not yet a manuscript, messy and vital, researched and personal, divided into fourteen or so sections. After the robbery I could only remember three of them (a few pieces of which remain, in emails sent to fellow writers). What is Dirt? Menotoxins. R is for Runaway Slave.

What is dirt? The OED traces its roots back to excrement, from the Middle English drit, dryt. The Promptorium Pavulorum, the first English-Latin dictionary, defines dyrte as donge, merda (shit), stercus (same). Laura Kipnis says the standard meaning is matter in the wrong place. (Filth, too, is defined as extraneous or foreign matter. In certain Appalachian and English regional dialects, filth refers to weeds; unwanted vegetation.What do you call the things that grow in your garden and shouldn’t be there?… Filth.) I was scrolling through Google Scholar and came across the entry Bitch Dirt. Bitch Dirt!? Did it have something to do with menstruation? (Pliny the Elder claims that the monthly flux of women turns new wine sour, makes crops wither, kills grafts, dries seeds in gardens, causes the fruit of trees to fall off, dims the bright surface of mirrors, dulls the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory, kills bees, rusts iron and bronze, and causes a horrible smell to fill the air.) When I clicked on the entry, however, I saw I had misread it. Not Bitch Dirt. Birth Dirt. The messy effluvia—the greasy vernix coating, the blood and mucus, and meconium and urine–of childbirth.Women’s filth again. Dirt proliferates. We have dirty jokes and dirty books and dirty bombs and dirty dogs and dirty tricks and dirty work and dirty dancing and dirty money and dirt bags. Dirty martinis, dirty blondes, dirty rice. Dirt.

And after, AFTER, I read Ocean Vuong and David Searcy and Elizabeth Strout, copying out bits in the glassine-wrapped notebook, trying to stay afloat. I made aphoristic one-line poems out of Ocean Vuong’s poems—In the body, where everything has a price, the major reordering of purpose; I didn’t know the cost/of entering a song was to forget the words—and clung to David Searcy’s essays: To give the information time to gather—random starlight, faint, discouraging, light-years-distant fact of starlight to accumulate round some sort of shadow of the deepest, most uncertain understanding. Not much more than that, but wouldn’t that be something, after all. Wasn’t he, too, talking about gleaning? I was getting messages; the universe seemed to be organizing itself around me. It was no wonder I chose to read Searcy’s collection titled Shame and Wonder. And Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible. How obvious.

A phrase came to me early on. Even now, sitting at my desk, I have a phantom feeling of then, sitting at my desk, the phrase slipping into and from my head: widen the rupture. Widen the rupture, don’t suture it. And after that Ocean Vuong, in an interview, not reading my mind but directly in it, taking up fleeting residency: making a cake together in the shadow of rupture. And from a FB friend: I hear you about living in the rupture. What did it mean?Tear, break, split, yes, but also, oddly hopeful, a breach into opportunity through which I might fall. I had the sense that when it widened, I would know. I also had the sense that any understanding was just out of reach. All I could think to do with any certainty after the robbery, after buying a new computer and filing the insurance claim and going to the gym every morning as if the body could wipe out disaster by plying an elliptical machine, was a massive reordering of my workspace, scouring the shelves and cabinets, eliminating books, tossing files, living in the rupture. Look, I said to Ann when I ushered her into my study weeks later to show off my labors, I got rid of so much and it looks exactly the same.

I kept the shame folder. Can We Bring Back the Stockades? Does Public Shaming Work? Pudendum, classical Latin, lit. that of which one ought to be ashamed; essays on face, losing it, saving it— (The concept came into the English lexicon from China in the mid-19^th century. J. R. Morrison, a translator and missionary who worked for the British East India Company in China, published a guide to trade, which included a Glossary of the Words and Phrases Peculiar to the Jargon Spoken at Canton; in it he defined face: appearance in society, reputation, credit; tolose face means to fall into discredit.); Monica Lewinsky’s interview in The Guardian: The shame sticks to you like tar. Hamlet to his mother: O shame! Where is thy blush? Bernard Williams: The basic experience connected with shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong condition; Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave: who felt, not anger but shame and embarrassment, when he first became aware of the history of slavery; Helen Merrell Lynd: it also carries the meaning of wound.

Shame is said to bemercurial; to be a free radical that attaches to…almost anything; to be a contaminant: watching another person’s humiliation…we become the beheld horror. But shame, if rescued from the engulfing, near-eschatological pathos surrounding…it in the popular discourse, can be productive too; engendering. Re-generative even. Isn’t that what Maggie Nelson suggests with her recast idea of contamination, which makes deep rather than disqualifies. According to Nelson, to be uncontaminated is to be untouched, uncontacted, and to be contaminated, by love for instance, or compassion or art, is to be enlarged. And Garth Greenwell, who says that the whole history of queer art is about taking stigma and turning it into style?

Stigma and style are actually closer than they first appear. The first is a mark, the other a marker. Sometimes this is a mark of disgrace, other times a marker of fertility. On a plant the two are in tight proximity, part of the sexual anatomy, the stigma obtuse, upon the style acuminate, as a 19^th botanical illustrator once described them.

The cops had suggested that the thief/thieves would probably wipe our computers clean before selling them. The likely re-sale venues were Craigslist, eBay, or a pawn shop. A tech team came over and dusted the house for prints. They found a complete set. With the help of a friend, I made a few feeble attempts to look on Craigslist but I couldn’t sustain the effort. The same friend made flyers for me to hang in the neighborhood. I didn’t put them up. Within forty-eight hours of the robbery, a small white light had detonated in my brain, a burst that left me light-headed. I was emptied. In the glassine notebook I wrote: Is this like a stroke?

A, of course, was for adulteress. There was also B for blasphemer, SL for seditious libeler, D for drunkard, F for forger, H for hog stealer, M for murderer, M for molester, T for thief, R for runaway slave.

Recently I found a list of the book’s sections embedded in an email dated several years ago. Actually, there were two emails, two lists, two weeks apart. The first list said not an order but the beginnings of an accounting. An accounting of what I’d done thus far, scavenging, culling, and connecting. Also, the sense that I was holding myself accountable. By declaring what I was doing, I had to do it. The second represented a decision: I’d labelled it first ordering. Were there others? How many re-visionings, which likely occasioned a number of re-orderings, came after that?

There’s been a run on shame lately
Double movement
I could have died
Blushing is a moral act
Visible/invisible/visible
R is for runaway slave
What is dirt?
Leaky body
Subway bleeding
Kotex for sale
Menotoxin
To be made unfit for use
She harvests it

I’d toyed with two titles. They made the quasi seem real. The first, The Shame Notebook, came from the notebook I started at the beginning of the project. That too I had ceremoniously titled. That too was an inauguration. The launch. The Shame Notebook, echo of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. I liked the informal feeling of it, the idea that the book, like the notebook, could be a collection of notes, resources, illuminations; a circuitry of thought, an improvisational gathering of ideas. From the first entry, dated 8/10/14:

Whore’s Mark/Nose Slitting
Ear-Cuffing
Achilles heel slitting?
♀️on subway/blood on seat
Being stood up
Steve McQueen/12 Years a Slave
pelvic guinea pig/paid practice patient
we live in the minds of others, without knowing it, C.H. Cooley
Tim O’Brien—fear of blushing
In a preview of the Iceman Cometh, [Ian] Holm unfortunately forgot his lines during a 22- minute monologue. In terror, he blundered offstage and curled up on his dressing room floor. As a result, Holm refused to return to the theater for 17 years.

The second title was Shamefast. The sound appealed, the oddness, how it played off shamefest. Stigma and style, excess and celebration. To be shamefaced, an etymological distortion of shamefast (Old English), first meant modest, shy, bashful, and then evolved to mean—or did it always contain?—its apparent opposite, ashamed, abashed. Bashful/abashed: one and the same face.

Thirty years ago my father had a stroke, which the ER doctor referred to as a medical insult. My father, unable to say the word stroke, said strake. Insult, stroke, strake. After the robbery, I entertained a desperate fantasy about retrieving the shame book. I told Ann to look in the Cloud (no matter that we weren’t on it), as if it were a real place, a tangible residence. As if, somehow, the book had floated up there of its own accord, for its own safe keeping. She looked, but it wasn’t there. I can’t recapture the [project’s] initiating impulse, I wrote early on in the glassine notebook. I can’t locate it inside myself.

How does the Shamewreck end? There are contradictions and confusions. There’s a new title now, a third one—shame seems to lend itself to riffing—which might herald a new beginning. Or another futile round of retrieval. Which is it? How does one know the difference? Perhaps, in my discomfiture, I am simply conflating the book and this essay, incorporating, as my one-time commiserating crusader encouraged, the theft into the story, the theft as the story. Write about it! I am, as it happens, contemplating a series of sonnets, derived from the shame notes, because sonnets are only fourteen lines, and I can picture the block of text irrefutably on the page—if not the words themselves—though I am, admittedly, ignorant of sonnets. I have started reading poets who work in the form in preparation. At the same time, I’ve reached a conclusion. Recently I professed to feeling like I had a brain injury, having no recollection that fifteen months ago I said the same thing (I don’t know…under what terms language will resurface). This is a metaphor, someone gently protested, and maybe it was. What arose was a blunt understanding that the book, as it had lived in me, was erased, out of reach—in a cloud somewhere as writer Elizabeth Crane posits about the murky past—but in any case unlocatable, which came not as a lament but as a recognition. It was a small, detonating moment, but this time of clarity. Reality as its own kind of solace: clear, harsh, scouring. The record has been wiped clean. Unexpectedly, almost contrarily, I felt relief. If the book no longer existed, I could stop trying to retrieve it. I could stop. There was no more to glean. The relief is real, and so is the sadness. Was the book ever more than a bunch of notes, riffs, and aspirations? Did it ever amount to anything? And if it didn’t, or not yet, is it any more discreditable to die like this? Here, as elsewhere, contamination makes deep rather than disqualifies, says Nelson. This is how the Shamewreck ends.

Peggy Shinner is the author of You Feel So Mortal / Essays on the Body (April 2014, University of Chicago Press). Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, Daedalus, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, and Bloom, and been anthologized in The Oldest We’ve Ever Been: Seven True Stories of Midlife Transitions (University of Arizona Press, 2008) and Her Face in the Mirror: Jewish Women on Mothers and Daughters (Beacon Press, 1995). She has been awarded two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, residencies at the Ucross and Ragdale Foundations, and a fellowship at Ausable Press. Currently, she teaches in the MFA program at Northwestern University. As a trained martial artist, she taught Seido karate for seventeen years. A life-long Chicagoan, she lives there with her partner, designer and book artist Ann Tyler.

Read more about Peggy Shinner at http://peggyshinner.com/