WWRN: "Light Years: Reading Proust & Growing Up" by Liana Jahan Imam
The universe has been listening to my conversations, threading everything together. It began last April, when I picked up Swann’s Way for the third time in ten years. Each time it surprised me that the resonant moment everyone seems to know about — the moment when the narrator eats a madeleine with tea, and the aroma, the feel of it in his mouth, the motion of dipping and then bringing it to the lips, sets loose a slough of tender and animate memory — happens quickly, on page 60. Each time I’ve thought maybe no one else has ever finished this book either.
I keep going the third time, farther than ever, with a loose goal to read the whole of In Search of Lost Time within the year. Alongside it, on a recommendation, I started Still Life With Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty, and six pages in I’d already texted as many friends that they should read it too. It moved me to underlining, to marginalia; it is 70 pages long and I dog-eared 30 of them. (Barthes once wrote about seeing a man reading on a bus and underlining every single word on the page: Nothing was less important than anything else.)
Early on, Doty describes becoming “drawn into the orbit of a painting... And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.” It’s a book full of rhymes and nods, and something catches when he mentions Giljsbrechts’s The Back of a Picture, which I know without exactly knowing: A painting of the back of a painting. It sends up a little Proustian chime, because I know M.’s version of it, a piece called Bad Painting. Not the real thing but a professional photograph on his website, two viewpoints on a page headed Works 2009, a black chair with a canvas balanced on it, both facing into the corner of a gallery.
I don’t know if Bad Painting is specifically a send up of The Back of a Picture, because M. and I didn’t talk about his work. We met in spring, in 2011, in Bushwick where we both lived, among the miles’ worth of warehouses that had been converted into then-affordable artist’s studios. Back then it was hard to know who to take seriously, and about what, but M.’s whole vision was that art was unserious. He said he liked making art that was jokes about other art. He had, as jokes, tattoos of fruit-and-vase still lifes and Picasso self-portraits; he had the names Manet and Watteau in a gothic font down each forearm. He had custom-printed curtains in his dingy apartment based on a Pollock painting, not mass-produced ones with a derivative splatter effect.
These pieces of him come back all at once, though I haven’t touched them in many years. (And there’s Proust again, in the way our least turned memories, ones we haven’t revised and parsed and intellectualized to beach glass, cut extra deep when they manage to work themselves up and loose.) I haven’t thought of M. in years because our affair lasted less than one. Six months after our last night together, my new lover told me — to fill a slow spell at our local bar, while he worked and I sat in front of him — about a guy in the neighborhood who’d been run down by a flatbed while he cycled home, and the photo in the obituary he showed me was a photo of M. I didn’t know how to look at any of it.
Yet so many of these sharp shards of memory have been stored up.
I remember leaving his apartment one afternoon and seeing a huge field of brazen dandelions in an empty lot. I sent a bad Blackberry picture to his flip phone. American art, my 23-year-old self captioned it for him.
I remember our last night, which was, according to the bloody details in the obit, only two weeks before. It had been a month or more since I’d received a text from him, and then there was one after a long shower. It was easy to convince me. It always was, that year. I remember M. drunker than I wanted when I showed up; he was surprised like he’d forgotten he’d asked me to come. Your hair’s wet, I remember him saying, with a charmed little glint in his voice like, how could this be. On my walk home the next morning I deleted his number, no special reason.
I remember that the night my new lover told me, he made all the right gestures and I stayed with him until he locked the bar at 5am and then pressed into him in his extra-long twin bed, like always, to prove that nothing was different, to prove that I was not feeling grief for a different casual lover. But I was thinking of the piece of paper taped to M.’s bedroom door and its remonstration, written in all-caps Sharpie, “STAY MOTIVATED, STAY HUNGRY,” and how by now someone had thrown that paper away, and the last time we fucked I’d decided I didn’t want to see him anymore, and now we never would.
And was it a grief? My language for loss was so undeveloped then. No one young and close to me had ever died; most of my friends never met M., and the ones who did only briefly at bars, slurry and glittering, without reason to believe he would be memorable for me. The few people I told were obviously perplexed by my sadness. To make up for this they asked a lot of questions about our affair, as if understanding our relationship would help them understand the grief. You didn’t know him that well, one of them said, as if there had to be a proportionality between what we tangibly had and what I abstractly lost. It never seemed like you were serious about him, said another, as if serious meant one particular thing. But what’s more serious than recalling how a person’s arms moved when he reached for you, how his eyes would cross when he sank in?
It felt vulgar, even selfish, to parse my sadness like this in 2012. This may have been because, in 2012, I wasn’t parsing much. I was impressed by default, sometimes stiflingly, by the people I met who could just say they were an artist, a dancer, a photographer, whatever, and that meant that they were. My potential writing career was both nascent and stalled. During the year after college I’d published three stories and gotten some prize money, but since moving to Brooklyn I’d barely opened a journal or a document, or even a book. Too busy partying, table-waiting, subway-riding from my job in the Lower East Side. Like the young narrator of Proust’s world, I was always convincing myself it was too late in the day to start anything meaningful; better to wait for “the empty frame of the following day where everything was so well arranged because I myself was not yet in it.” But every following day there was another train, another party, and I’d put myself in those instead.
Presenting myself as a writer felt borderline hallucinatory; I was in food and beverage, and grateful that in New York that industry carried its own shiny suggestion of creativity. But after meeting dozens of alleged painters and poets, all desperate to make me grasp the severity of their work, it was becoming obvious that though they wanted me to feel something, they didn’t know how to talk about it any more than I did. M. was distinct, clear in his vision so that it was separate from the way he approached me. He was 30, from Montreal, had lived in Brooklyn I think less than a year, less time than me. He had representation and a new studio space in Soho. It didn’t matter if some dive-bar girl he wanted to fuck understood his art.
Looking back, it feels easy to say that if my friends reacted badly to my grief, it was because they, like me, were very young and, overall, very lucky. We were self-obsessed and underslept, running on $5 deli sandwiches and family meals, and caring for one another by buying a round of shots instead of asking how the day had been. We didn’t want to look at losses, much less their language. And so I let myself feel like my friends were mostly right that other people were worse off than me; making myself believe there was not much to grieve became the way I let my grief go.
Looking at it now, it feels obvious to say that griefs are themselves abstractions, not attaching directly to the thing that is lost but to a whole splattered canvas of personal associations. That it’s possible to mourn anything that was once within, as Doty called it, your orbit of intimacy. That that grief was, yes, about M., but was also something conceptual and grandiose about youth and invincibility and choice. And that there was no inherent shame in being, yes, a little grandiose in mourning my illusions.
M.’s website is still operating, stuck forever on Works 2010. When I look at it now, the jokes are legible to me, even transparent: A canvas with a thick trail of paint across called One Liner; another with a bike shoved in and one handlebar and some chain protruding, overtly Duchamp-y, called My Bike Disguised as Contemporary Art. I wonder what M. — a man who died before owning a smartphone — would have made of Instagram, its large subset of the meme world that uses art to make jokes about grief. Wonder if he would hate or love posts like a Lautrec scene of three people sitting at a bar watching couples dancing with the text bubble, “A group of people is called a hell.”
Thinking about M., there are a lot of jokes I want to tell him. Like how during one slogging section in Swann, the titular man is at a party at court, thinking about what his mistress might be doing — she’s ignored his letters all day and he’s sure it’s because of some other man— and his fussy anxiety turns into an obsessive attention to the way all the men in the room are wearing their monocles. This scene reminded me of the business card scene from American Psycho, Swann and Bateman both such sycophantic observers of near-invisible differences, and once I started to think about reading Swann’s Way the way I’d think about reading American Psycho it got very easy. I wish I could text him: Was Proust just the Bret Easton Ellis of French modernism? But maybe M. never read Proust; maybe my jokes, now, would be illegible to him.
It might not be a coincidence that as I’ve become more able to talk about both art and grief, I’m also more able to express how I want my own work to refract the things I love. The woman who recommended Doty’s book to me also asked, laughing, why I would ever want to read a series of novels with over four thousand pages that is notoriously, according to some, about nothing. Proust cares about the things I care about, I told her, and this is always an adequate explanation with people like us. I’m now deep into The Guermantes Way, the third installment, and it’s incredibly obvious that In Search of Lost Time is, in fact, about everything. It’s about the heart-stopping, stomach-curdling feeling of describing a novel to someone you admire and they point out a minor detail you got wrong. It’s about how hard it is to know someone and the unreality of persona. It’s about boredom, morbidity, vanity, mansplaining, mythology. It’s about the way you can never remember the face of someone you’ve just met and already love.
All of these things are jokes; all of these things are griefs.
I made my author website in 2015, when I was applying for MFA programs. I had been working an office job for two years, and though I loathed the schedule it had its perks, like being able to plan ahead for readings and poetry salons, like feeling rested enough to have written half a book and publish a new little run of stories. Writer, finally, was a title I’d earned, but I hadn’t lost the habit of qualifying it, or not leading with it. I work at a startup but I’m also writing a novel, I’d tell people at the readings. The website was a gift to myself, a claimed space to display these proofs that I was what I said I was. Its first incarnation included the option to sign up for a mailing list. Every once in a while I’d post a little prose poem, and subscribers got an email alert that included the image of Bad Painting. It was what you had to click to get there, an overt moment of telling that there was something behind it to look at. Dozens of people would click on M.’s painting to read my poetry; I made them think of him without knowing it. It didn’t feel weighty or even terribly significant to include him in this way, but it also might not have been a coincidence.
Mark Doty says that in a still life, the human is defined by their detritus. By the evidence, irrefutable, of having been there. Having squeezed the lemons and eaten the oysters. Having painted the painting, even if no one else sees it. He thinks some of the best genius of the Dutch Masters was in the “more subtle negotiations with qualities of light, with reflection and transparency and opacity.” And what is a grief but an opacity that might be soothed by an amount of light? What is a joke but a reflection of a grief? One is required to obviate another, to show what it might eventually mean.
I moved to Detroit in February of last year, and had six bright, cold weeks in the city before it all shut down. One afternoon, at the bakery I love best, I saw an acquaintance of about ten years. This was the third time we’d lived in the same city, and we were both surprised; I thought he was still in Brooklyn, he thought I was still not in Brooklyn. Out West, he thought, and yes, I’d moved to Missoula for my MFA. This July, it will be a nice round five years since I’ve lived in New York City.
The bakery was fairly empty and I wondered what there would be to say to one another if we let a chat develop; despite how long we’d been friendly, most of our interactions took place in passing, constrained. Running into someone in Brooklyn, one person was always busy and the other was always leaving.
What are you doing now, he wanted to know, and my worry unknit itself. It was such an easy question to answer.
I’m writing a book, I said, folding my hands on the table and grinning.
Liana Jahan Imam was raised in Southeast Michigan and finished in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and is currently located in Detroit, where she teaches, co-hosts a virtual meetup on hybrid poetics, and works on a long-term project around familial legacy, spatial culture, and inheritance. For more recent work, visit her at www.lianajimam.com.
