"Decomposition" by Bonnie Chau
Fall wasn’t such a big deal during the first few decades of my life in California—though possibly it was there that the seeds of my antipathy were planted, by the season’s Santa Ana winds—but in the past decade of living on the east coast, I have hated fall. It is probably a tiny bit my contrarian nature—people love fall, I hate fall—but mostly, it’s something true to myself, true to my body, true because I can’t not equate fall with impending winter. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the relief of feeling cool after feeling hot, of feeling dry after feeling sticky with sweat. Gradually, over the last decade, I’ve grown to find some pleasure in the changing light. I’m pretty entertained kicking my way through piles of dry leaves. Beautiful trees aflame with red orange yellows are beautiful to me; I register that beauty, sure. But ultimately those things kind of round down, are overwhelmed completely by my dread of winter. I suppose following this logic, and the cycles of seasons, if fall reminds me of winter, shouldn’t winter remind me of spring? Shouldn’t fall then remind me of spring?
Recently, I came across John Keats’s poem, “To Autumn.” Keats’s ode—maybe in 1820, fall was an underdog—zeroes in on a series of small, subtle, sensory observations of fall. The poem is a gesture to fleeting moments, ephemerality, the passage of time, transience of life, like a 17th-century still life painting but with sound and wind and flight. This has been one of the conventional uses of autumn in art, as a symbol of senescence and mortality. Though I can’t say I’m that interested in this usage—come on, too easy no? more evidence of the tyranny of artists from the lands of deciduousness!—I am pretty interested in thinking about death and dying. Memento mori, vanitas, decomposition.
In the last couple months, I’ve spent occasional moments—breaks from chaos, breaks from fowl upkeep, breaks between chores, breaks from the heat or downpours outside—listening to Wet-Togetherness, a collaborative project between the 13th Shanghai Biennale: Bodies of Water and e-flux which consists of nine sound pieces that “enact aqueousness through sound.” In the second episode, titled “Decomposing,” I listened, lying on my bed, staring up at the ceiling, to the artist Wang Tuo’s sentences flow from talking about a relationship with language, to a deconstruction of the word “decomposing” into fragments, to a constructed meaning:
After all those years in the U.S., completely immersed in English-speaking context, I still failed to think in English. Whenever I want to express something, the meaning always instantly goes through a process of translation in my mind. In other words, a foreign word or concept, to me, is naturally fragmented, and deconstructed. In Chinese, pictograms are the basis of the language system, so that when you think of a word, it appears in your mind as an image, and this image may refer to a series of actions or states. Perhaps the image that a word conjures in your mind is closer to its essence. Decomposing is a compound word. But what does it mean? We might break it down into several parts, like deco, om, pose, sing. This is something like an om chanting with a decorative gesture, to me. Om chanting was originally a practice of communication between man and his environment through the vibration that resonates between physical body and external aura, achieving something similar to the Chinese philosophy of celestial unity, the unity of heaven and man. Within the context of deco, om, pose, sing, the celestial unity takes on a decorative gesture.
I like this line of thought, this idea of language, when given a specific context of foreignness, as automatically prone to decomposition—an entropic tendency built into it, which, through play, can lead to revelation. I have been seeing decomposition everywhere these days, and it feels like a hopeful thing, to propose that truth might be gleaned from a process of collapse. It doesn’t take any real stretch of the imagination as we struggle through the extremes of current weather catastrophes—every place overtaken by fire or by water—to deem these apocalyptic scenes of climate change a sort of breaking down of the earth’s ecosystems.
Watch any nature documentary—or better yet just watch nature—for a reminder that breaking down is twinned with its opposite. In Louis Schwartzberg’s 2019 documentary Fantastic Fungi, it’s mushrooms and fungi which are the great decomposers of the world and also its great regenerators. In the film, Eugenia Bone, food/nature/science writer and former president of the New York Mycological Society, talks about the association people have of mold with death and decay, which results in “a lot of fear because of fungi’s role in the cycle of life—they decompose dead and dying organisms and move all those nutrients back into the cycle. They kind of are at the very end of stuff. But they’re also at the beginning.” I had never thought of fungi, mold, and mushrooms as particularly fear-inducing, but I enjoy this characterization. Every story of decomposition is a story of composition. As I watched the documentary, I thought about how even more than that, this story of decomposition—microorganisms, slime mold, fungi and their relationships to trees and plants, the mycelial and mycorrhizae networks—is a story of togetherness. Decomposition does not happen in isolation. You cannot decompose alone.
I have been thinking about decomposition, also, in connection to the life of a creative work. Books, too, come and go. I think about Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” in which “a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life.” Just as a text (and by extension, its author) might be dependent on a translator for an afterlife, we might say that readers of books, viewers of films—audiences of art, who, like translators, form interpretations—allow for proliferations of afterlives. An afterlife presupposes the ending or deconstruction of a previous life, a decomposition.
I thought about these ideas of decomposition and afterlives and aloneness, and I thought about the idea of art/artist separation, because I am always thinking about that, and I thought about Sally Rooney, because, well, what else? I’ve been reading the various articles that have been written surrounding the release of Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You. This includes reading about the hype over the bucket hat that was part of the book’s marketing campaign, and reading the Lit Hub piece that reported Rooney would only do one single publicity event, speculating about a connection between Rooney’s personal aversion to publicity and a passage in the novel where one of the protagonists, a young writer who’s become very famous and successful, talks about her aversion to book publicity:
If I had bad manners and was personally unpleasant and spoke with an irritating accent, which in my opinion is probably the case, would it have anything to do with my novels? Of course not. The work would be the same, no different. And what do the books gain by being attached to me, my face, my mannerisms, in all their demoralizing specificity? Nothing. So why, why, is it done this way? Whose interests does it serve? It makes me miserable, keeps me away from the one thing in my life that has any meaning, contributes nothing to the public interest…
But I do find that my reading of Rooney’s books gains something from my knowledge that at twenty-two she was the number one debater on the European continent, and that her novels are lauded for their dialogue and email exchanges, and are chock full of characters who are extraordinarily articulate and brilliant at conversation. I find it quite interesting that my notions about Rooney and her novels are forever colored by the opening paragraph of the 2018 New Yorker profile by Lauren Collins that reads:
In the warm kitchen of a bungalow just off a two-lane road in far-western Ireland, the novelist Sally Rooney, her mother, her sister, and her mother’s friend were contesting the issues of the day over a supper of pork loin, roasted potatoes, green beans, red peppers, and applesauce. The pace of the conversation was brisk, the threshold for entry high. You had to be careful with the prosecco.
I know that this is Collins’s portrayal of Rooney, and that people and publications have their own agendas and biases, but I just can’t escape it—I think of this paragraph and the scene it evokes every time I read Rooney or about Rooney. I’m not that interested in a work remaining “the same, no different.” I think it does contribute something, that Rooney’s mother was the director of a local community arts center, that she describes her family as bookish but not literary, that they spent their summer holidays at some coastal town, that she said of her socialist parents, in a Vogue profile, that “‘Neither of them were remotely success-orientated...They were just happy for their kids to be happy, and if one of us wanted to be a literary novelist or whatever, it was like, “Well, whatever makes you happy, darling. Pursue your dream.’”
I read books for many reasons, and sometimes, I read books because to read a book can be an encounter with a work of art, which is also an encounter with an artist and with a creative practice. Do I feel that knowing what I know about Rooney (which is only what I’ve read in interviews and profiles, so, nothing more than a public persona), my reading of her books gains something by being attached to her specifically? If by “gain” one might count a richer, more complex experience of personal engagement with an artist’s/writer’s work, then yes, I do.
At the end of Wang Tuo’s “Decomposing” sound piece, he says:
I walked around the empty area surrounding the city of Changchun, which was once a circle of its own, with Kuomintang garrisoned in the inner circle, the Communist forces besieging the city in the outer circle, and the uncountable civilians trapped inside the circles with no room to advance or retreat. This empty circle is now replaced with bustling shopping centers and flyovers. Like those uncountable bodies in history, decaying, decomposing, and reintegrated into the soil, all the sinkholes of history are slowly smoothed out, eventually leaving a decorative celestial unity.
Wang Tuo’s work is heavily haunted by the past, and yet alongside the trauma of history, there is something strangely, speculatively hopeful and generative of togetherness, or becoming-with, in his envisioning of this perpetual smoothing-out, this cycle of decomposing and reintegration, lives followed by endless afterlives. In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin writes about alternative shapes to the traditional hero’s journey story arc. One element of this is the story that simply keeps on going.
Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.
If you’re the type of artist who believes that art is inseparable from life, or that your art is inseparable from your life, then why would the audience for that art want or attempt to separate the two? The viewer of art is an integral part of the community and world of art, the ongoing life of art, the process of moving towards the afterlife, through cycles of lives and afterlives. Perhaps we read a book the first time and we know nothing of its author, perhaps we look at a painting and we know nothing of its artist. Perhaps later on we read something, or learn something, or later on something is revealed or divulged or done, and we know more about the creator than before. I think that this too might be a way in which a work of art accrues more life and becomes an unending story.
Bonnie Chau is a writer and translator from Southern California. She earned her MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University; and has received fellowship and residency support from Kundiman, Art Farm Nebraska, the American Literary Translators Association, Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, and the Black Mountain Institute. She is the author of the short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood (2018), and is currently an editor at Public Books and the Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell’s Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts.
