by Maggie K
Adam points down the hill which ends at the river–or maybe it’s more of a dune?–and says to me, “Those two chairs make it look like the set up for a talk show." At this time in the past, and this time currently, that you are looking down at me in the same position that I looked down at someone else 3, 4 weeks ago–or maybe it was a month and a half ago or two months ago, there are readers, musicians, and performers who face the audience, sometimes sitting in a chair, sometimes standing, sometimes with a microphone, sometimes without, who are sitting on a hill, which is sandy enough to be called a dune.
I tell Adam, “That’s a good idea for a future reading–one in a talk show format.” I elaborate that it should not, actually, be a real dialogue, but a monologue that is split between two speakers, sitting in two chairs at the bottom of the hill that’s maybe a dune, with one speaking statements in the tone of questions, but these must still be statements in this monologue style. The form and tone, then, are of a talk show-style interview, while the content is a monologue between me and an interlocutor who will interview me. Maybe Adam will be my interlocutor. Adam will not be my interlocutor. I look towards the river and see a duck swimming behind the two chairs at the bottom of the hill that’s more like a dune, leading some ducklings.
The content of the reading, then, would have to be as unsuitable for the dialogic format as possible. It needs to be claustrophobic, ideally a narrative on neurotic interiority. When I and my interlocutor who is not not also me in this situation read our lines at the bottom of a hill that is more of a dune where I saw a duck leading some ducklings in the river behind two chairs set up like a talk show set at the end of June, a few weeks or maybe a month and a half ago, I want the listener sitting on this hill that is more of a dune–who a few weeks or maybe a month and a half ago would have been me and not you–or perhaps you as well as me, who I am speaking to now–to feel vaguely trapped and uncomfortable. I do not want this to be a pleasant experience for any of us. But who would be my interlocutor?
I’m worried about the reading, that this piece will come off as too derivative, too gimmicky, too contrived. I worry it is too much of a copy of the style of Gerald Murnane, the Australian author I have been reading a lot of recently. To an extent, this might be unavoidable, as his writing is primarily oriented towards exteriorizing through transcribing interior states and interior landscapes as precisely as possible for the reader to, in turn, interiorize through reading. His writing, which I am thinking about as I look down the hill from where I stand (unlike most of you, three weeks or maybe two months ago when I looked down this hill-as-dune and saw the ducks behind the chairs, I, along with Adam, had been standing prominently at the top of the hill, rather than sitting down in the sand which will get between your toes, having arrived late from work) consistently echoes through my mind, both in terms of the precision of transcribing a no-longer-interior state–
Here I have to break up the narrative that I had thought of while standing on the hill that has enough sand to be a dune and imagined reading with an interlocutor as a dialogue in two chairs facing the audience. The next line, originally written, was: “And its flipside, the oblique way in which he writes about sex and repression, although I lack the excuse of being raised Catholic." In the weeks after standing where you are now sitting, I kept feeling that this, alongside several other lines that were originally in the text, one which mentioned forced vulnerability and others which failed to reference the setting of the dune which faces the chairs and the ducks–some of which have yet to be introduced–and the bridge that I saw off to the left of the ducks and the chairs–which I will tell you about more in time–had stuck out from the dreamlike nature of the rest of the narrative, if I can call it dream-like. I would spend weeks wondering whether I should change it, which I tell you now in a paragraph out of step with the rest of this text, a paragraph which only lightly touches upon the landscape setting of the story, which, I think, is more of the "main character" in this story than I am or you are. These thoughts went through my head for three, maybe four weeks after the time I had arrived late to the scene, but now I will return to the setting of writing immediately after standing on top of the dune, which is more like a hill that you now sit upon–of which more of my perspective on the view you may now have will be laid out now.
In part, the desire to write out claustrophobic interiority had already been on my mind when I looked down the hill you are now sitting on (or, in some cases, standing upon). 24 hours prior, some friends and I had been speaking about another similarly structured novel with some friends at a bar one mile west of the dune that I would, 24 hours later, stand atop, looking at two chairs facing each other like the set up to a talk show that ducks swim behind–which is the same dune that you, 3 weeks or maybe 2 months later, sit on, looking down at me and perhaps another person. One of those friends at this moment in the past, 24 hours after speaking about that similarly structured book in the nearby bar, was now sitting 10 feet further down the hill, which is more of a dune that I am standing atop of. Maybe five minutes after seeing the duck leading the ducklings behind the chairs, she turns back, notices me, waves hello. She had arrived on time rather than arriving late from work. After she waves, I see six ducks flying now behind the chairs, upwards and to the right, while the duck leading the ducklings had been swimming to the left of the chairs, swimming upstream. For a second, I am surprised that the ducklings can already fly so well, before I look to the right of the chairs and see the duck still swimming, now in some reeds, with its ducklings in tow. I do not think she will be my interlocutor.
While watching the other readers, and later the musicians (who occupy the two chairs which Adam had remarked look like they might be the set to a talk show, the two chairs that both groups of ducks-and-lings exist behind if you see them from your place standing on top of the hill you now sit upon, where my friend who waved at me will sit in adjacence in order to perform backing vocals), I continue to obsess over the potential future reading, which is now a present-reading. I know the general features of it. It needs to be precise like the writing of Australian author Gerald Murnane and it must be a monologic narrative forced into dialogic form. There is some theme here about seeing and being seen, or hearing and being heard, or in one way or another giving an account of myself to another. I am wondering, then, how will I be perceived by the 40 to 50 people sitting on a hill looking down at me? Will there be ducks behind me, or us, sitting in two chairs arranged like a talk show? If so, will they be swimming or in flight? I imagine by this point in the future that those ducklings 3 weeks ago–or, more likely, a month and a half ago, though perhaps already at that time in between these two moments, where I stood concerned over the flow of this piece, as I mentioned earlier–are now more grown, and perhaps no longer following the duck. Maybe a train consisting only of an engine and a single carriage will cross the bridge further to the left of the chairs as you see these chairs, which I saw maybe half an hour after the ducks in flight three weeks or maybe two months ago.
I think to myself, “What would I ask to be introduced as?” Whom have I asked the curator to introduce me as? Maggie, as most know me? Margaret, which for some reason feels more feminine? Mags, as I am at work? or perhaps I will be introduced alongside an interlocutor, “Maggie and so and so," such that it isn’t immediately clear which of us wrote the dialogue and which of us is not not us. Will I be understood as a woman, unlike Australian author Gerald Murnane, one introduced and now named Maggie? Was I understood as a woman by people who looked up the hill that is also a dune which I stood on top of 3 weeks, or maybe two months, ago? Does anyone who has already known me look down, or had they looked up, and still, against their own will, thought of me as Matt? Or perhaps I could have them introduce me with a completely different name as I walk down to the bottom of the hill, which is more of a dune to sit on, to one of the chairs which ducks and trains swim and fly and drive behind in front of 50 or so people 3 weeks–or two months–after I had stood on top of the dune-hill watching other readers walk down and speak, sometimes with a microphone and sometimes without, rather than Margaret, or Maggie, or Mags, even if some of you still find yourselves unwillingly thinking of me as Matt.
Here, once more, I will step out of time, to that period maybe three weeks after I originally wrote about standing on top of a dune that is more of a hill, with those ducks and that train in the background. I had sent this piece to a friend who assumed it was primarily fictive. This is not fiction. I could make it fictive easily–I could talk about the large cottonwood trees, for example, that cover the beaches in their white cum-like tufts, which occur further up and further down the river. These trees would be evocative, it would not be far from the real setting–the one in which I stood on top of that dune that is more of a hill, looking down at those ducks and those people, some of whom I may be looking at now, though facing upwards instead. But I cannot recall if those trees are on this beach or only on beaches further up past the tracks I saw a train going across, or further down, the direction which the second group of ducks took flight towards. Even if they are here, this failure to remember would make it fictive if I told you now that they were a part of the setting. My real anxiety revolved around the real status of the other characters mentioned in passing throughout this monologue (which may or may not be recited as a dialogue). These are all real people, yet the descriptors are kept vague enough that they might as well be fictive. You would not know them by the loose descriptions I recite to you now, as you look down upon me, known by Margaret, or Maggie, or Mags. In part, this aside has overwritten another section I felt unsure of, in which I granted too much reality to characters who could have asked me questions in front of a river with its ducks and trains and without the cottonwoods overlooking us, which a month prior to Adam telling me those two chairs look like the set of a talk show had covered other portions of the river’s buffer in a blanket of white tufts. We can now return to the setting of this story, which is me thinking about the landscape I imagined would occur several weeks from the time I saw two chairs facing each other like the set of a talk show, at the bottom of this hill that is more of a dune.
I do not know–while I am looking down the hill, looking down now at the two musicians sitting in the chairs arranged like a talk show, that an interlocutor and I will sit in 3 weeks, or, upon editing this, a month and a half from then, with the friend who turned and waved hello at me after I saw the ducks swim and before seeing the other ducks fly now, sitting adjacent, singing–whether I will tailor my reading to whoever winds up being my interlocutor or if I will give up on the central conceit entirely. I don’t think I will, it feels safer and less of an ask of another that way if, in the end, they’re interchangeable with another. If they are intended to be Margaret’s–or Maggie’s, or Mags’s, or unwillingly Matt’s–interlocutor in the general sense, I would not be asking for a kind of intimate sharing in the way in which I would be if I were to ask them to sit facing me in these chairs arranged like the set of a talk show at the bottom of a hill that is more like a dune in front of the Mississippi River as my particular interlocutor. A month prior to my standing at the top of that hill you are sitting and standing on now with Adam–perhaps at the time the tufts of white tree-cum from the cottonwoods had blanketed much of the river’s buffer–I had told several friends that my confessionalist tendencies are a terrible trait, which I put on display now speaking in front of 40 or 50 people at the bottom of a hill that’s more like a dune in front of ducks and trains and rivers, as I think about standing at the top of that hill that is more of a dune, looking down at two chairs facing each other like the set of a talk show. What I meant by that then–and what concern I am trying to voice to you now–is that the tendency towards confession is a way to speak to general rather than particular interlocutors and audiences who sit and stand on a hill I stood on top of three weeks prior, or maybe now two months ago, facing two people sitting in two chairs facing each other like a talk show set, or maybe one standing, in front of ducks swimming, leading their ducklings, and other ducks flying through the sky, and a train with only an engine and one carriage driving over a bridge further to the left of the scene over the Mississippi River, with maybe 40 or 50 other people, watching two of them speak a monologue from Margaret–or Maggie, or Mags, or unwillingly still Matt’s–perspective, hopefully not too derivative of the Australian author Gerald Murnane.
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Maggie K is a meatcutter in Minneapolis.
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