We Find Ourselves at Our Most Distracted

That's from Drifts, Kate Zambreno's 2020 book that is marketed as a novel but isn't, feels like a memoir but isn't, and implies philosophical inquiry but isn't. Mostly it's a series of moods or textures, a mode of existing and processing experience. Nothing much happens in Drifts, and to spell out the book's events would be to undermine the whole point, which is simply creating and sustaining an atmosphere, then allowing it to interact with everyday life. Among other things. It's not abstract literature, but it functions a bit like abstract art.

I've read a decent amount of books that do more or less what Zambreno is both describing and doing in Drifts: Renata Adler's Speedboat, Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, a few Rachel Cusk books, Deborah Levy, some of Robert Walser, most of W.G. Sebald. Some of these books are more voice-y than others (Walser, Tokarczuk, Adler), some are more interested in wandering the perimeter of a form of enlightenment or at least clarity that remains out of reach. For Sebald this wandering is tragic and universal and historical; for Cusk it's inevitable and, I think, practical and necessary, if inconvenient, like sitting on an airplane.

Zambreno, at least in Drifts, isn't trying to make you empathize with the struggles she catalogues. She's trying to express the way we can feel both static and under duress at the same time. Her narrator—it's Zambreno, we intuit somehow that the narrator is her as readers, but, still, her narrator—is frustrated by what she sees as her failed attempt to simply capture the experience of time in her writing. The experience of time is fundamental to how we experience our life, but most writers tend to fake it a little bit for the sake of keeping a narrative speedy.

Imagine you have a big and high-pressure project at work, and it's due in a month. That proj might hang over your head in a kind of general sense for a while. It might be big enough to affect the weather while it's up there. But you go about your daily business, doing the things you do, not doing the things you don't do. You don't constantly think about the project. You don't necessarily experience the weather system the project is creating, but in the same way that you stop thinking about the rain after a while but still get wet, the project is still doing its thing. Time moves at a normal pace, most of the time. Unless you're triaging a crisis, you don't really experience the kind of mental locomotion that conflict produces when it's narrativized. You don't verbalize your worries about the project to yourself. You don't stay in a bad mood for a month. So much of being alive is about simply surfing through moods.

This often makes writers uncomfortable. It kills narrative tension, and it suggests that revelation, and thus character development, is hard to come by. Think of a Raymond Carver story, the way it asks you to patiently examine a character as they move through the still emotional air of their life. Suddenly a gong resounds and the rose bush they've been trimming reveals itself to be A Source of Great Truth that unlocks whatever box the character's been trapped inside. Life is so rarely this way. Time is never this way.

For a while in my early 20s, I went to an evangelical church that emphasized having a personal relationship with God. That relationship was meant to be powered by rich, clear emotions—waves pounding onto rocks, sunset blooding the Grand Canyon, the sublime brimming beneath the surface of even the dullest of life pursuits. Stand in the freezer aisle and be in awe of your God, was the general vibe. Imagine what this must have been like, if you took this seriously, every moment potentially pregnant with meaning, and thus every moment ready to be read. How would you handle the mundane? Or the normal? The Bible was filled with people who hadn't paid attention to the ways God was obviously communicating with them. But it becomes exhausting moving through the world this way, wondering whether He would appear like a pop-up ad. Ignore and perish!

I'm wary of sentimentalism, because I am a very easy mark. If something makes me cry, I am convinced of its truth—theological, emotional, whatever. This is not a virtue. Though I sometimes would like it to be, because it does make things much easier. Because of that, and a million other small wounds besides, I bristle at any kind of fiction built around sudden epiphanies, or that's focused on the moral growth of the main character above all else. It always comes off as a call to self-improvement or self-help; I value both of those things, so I try to seek them out directly. In these books, the moral of the story is the point, the story itself nothing more than an argument.

Does this mean that most of the books I read are boring? Yes. It does.

There is something here that I'm having trouble getting at. The appeal of books where nothing really happens. I would like to think of this as ambient literature, because it serves a similar function as ambient music (and is vulnerable to the same downfalls). There is, however, already a project using this name that defines "ambient" in a way that suggests literature is and should be all around us. This is technically the correct definition of "ambient," but it has the opposite valence of the one I'm looking for. If I found myself surrounded by stories waiting to be read, if all the world is a series of interlocking or adjacent tales, then I'm back in the deeply enchanted world of evangelicalism.

Most manifestations of that idea died for me a long time ago. But I'm having trouble disposing of the corpses. I can't get over the wish that there would be something bigger and greater to seek out at all times. C.S. Lewis is licking his chops here: "If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world," goes the quote college ministries use after one of their students reads Sartre. Lewis' explanation is not logical, but it's well stated, so it rings with a kind of aesthetic clarity that drowns out the dissonance of what it's actually saying. Strike a tuning fork, declare the whole world off key, and believe the fork is the one telling the truth.

I didn't sleep well last night. I read a bit of McKenzie Wark's Reverse Cowgirl, I read a bit of Mundial's special issue for the Euros. Then I tossed around the sheets for a few hours. Writing ideas were thrashing their way into my consciousness. "And the idea just came to me!" people sometimes say, "I don't know from where!" Delivered like a single macaron on a feather pillow. This wasn't like that; this felt like someone was spitting at me, over and over and over. These were things I'd already considered writing about being read back to me in a rapid cycle; the more and faster it spun, the more it pressed the substance out of my thoughts, the more it exposed the shallowness at the core of everything I'd wanted to spend my time thinking about. Or at least, that's what the image had me convinced of. Imagine becoming aware of your own desperation because you're being mocked for it.

Things don't simply come to me. Often. But there is always mood, and there is always texture. And I'm always alive.

Rachelle has been collecting rocks and crystals and gems for years. She keeps them in a flat file in our living room, and every couple of days, she'll ask me to pick one for her to hang out with while she works. I try not to think too hard about this and just pick whatever feels like it suits the emotional climate in our house at the time. She pulled out a blue and green kyanite the size of a grapefruit recently, and we both stared at it quietly, rotating it in the light from our living room window. Kyanite is flakey but highly structured—it shards the way celery or string cheese does, so there are usually long parallel lines that give it a pleasing ridged texture. This kyanite gleamed. One facet was the size of my palm, and held as many minor color variations. Prussian blues, yves klein blues, carolina blues, fading into a dollar greens, greenish gray, with ironized red veining through. I couldn't stop looking at it. I wanted, in a way I couldn't explain, for the stone to be part of me, or for me to be it. To just be there, undeniable, singular, without having to mean anything. Many people seek out great truths in stones, whether metaphysical truths or otherwise, which means that looking at them can be an exercise in narrativization. I've done this plenty of times. I'm trying not to. And the blue kyanite sat there, in Rachelle's hands, with nothing to say. It's not the most magnificent stone she owns. I've never enjoyed looking at one more.

Later in Drifts, Zambreno's narrator takes a train into New York City from her nameless suburb. She's reading Walser, with an intro by William Gass.

If I understand Zambreno correctly, the impulse to shrink as small as possible and write as small as possible is not the same impulse to keep oneself quiet, to pack oneself away, to resist filling the space in the world that one is afforded. It's more like letting things be. Resisting the urge to present—and thus understand—life as being primarily a journey between moments of great, or even mediocre, profundity. It's a way of keeping time, but not a way of waiting. It suggests to me that I should abolish the idea of waiting. Not because developing presence in the moment leads to greater pleasure or understanding, or has any kind of tangible benefit whatsoever, but because it is, quite simply, the present.

This sounds like a spiritual practice, or another way of saying that there is holy beauty to be found in the present. It's not. There is. But only sometimes. It's more like allowing life to be what it is, rather than trying to squeeze the sweet juice of revelation—or experience, or enjoyment, or engagement, or pleasure, or pain, or misery, or bleakness, or anything—out of every moment. This is not Bradford Cox singing "nothing ever happened to me" then punching out a three-guitar attack with his bandmates that makes you realize that nothingness is the raddest shit that can happen to a human being. Though it is true that nothingness gives us incredible opportunities to fill it with things we never knew we could create. What I mean is more like Nick Cave singing "Most of all nothing much ever really happens, and God rides high up in the ordinary sky" without even wondering whether the next line will provide a payoff.