On Saturday, Nov. 15th, we ate enchiladas (courtesy of PR Griffis) and talked to Richard Siken and Manuel Muñoz about their thoughts on beauty.
Richard Siken started off the evening, asking us to think of beauty in terms of “units.” For the prose writer and the poet, there are sentences and lines, words, paragraphs, essays, stories, poems. “I’m not sure morphemes and phonemes are where beauty is meant to accumulate,” he said, giving us a limit. Somewhere between sentences and sounds, beauty exists.
He talked about how poets play with the friction between sentences and lines, but how others, like Gertrude Stein, insist “emotion only happens in a paragraph” where you have sentences pitted against sentences. Richard acknowledged: “the fact that beauty can come in units is weird,” wishing that there was a way to measure such things. “But,” he said, “it’s not the metric system.”
Here, Manuel Muñoz picked up, agreeing. When working on his first book, he said, “I forgot about character, I forgot about forward movement, I sometimes forgot about plot.” What he focused on were sounds, sentences, and beautiful language. One unit of beauty took precedence over others – sound and language dominated. Not that that was wrong, or his new focus on character is right. It’s about consciousness, and style, and knowing where your style is coming from.
To elaborate, Richard talked about massage artists. He noted one technique they have is to imagine their wrists as dead, as if their hands were separate from their bodies. Sculptors do the opposite. Their wrists are low filters, direct channels into their arms, their heads, their hearts. Both Richard and Manuel agreed: we are grander than just writers – as artists, we’re working with representation. In Richard’s words, “the world is being filtered through us.” We have to watch how high our filters are, because “somehow, I have to get it out of my head and into your head. It’s not just whether it’s beautiful or not; it’s how it’s packaged.”
Beauty seems absolute, yet while we tend to agree on what is not beautiful, there’s no consensus on what is beautiful. What do our professors consider beautiful? Manuel’s first memory of this came from watching his grandmother put on knee-high stockings. He saw a scar from a black widow bite she got on a trip to the outhouse, and felt for the first time the danger and her mortality. Richard’s grandmother, a stroke victim, would try to crack eggs with the half of her body that wasn’t properly coordinated. He still remembers eggs slammed on the countertop. Their grandmothers were gorgeous and memorable; for Manuel, it was proximity; for Richard, it was the breaking of social mores.
Proximity happened to be one of Richard’s favorite words (along with cleave, braniac, and pistachio). It turned his memory to waiting tables at The Cup, where he had to say “behind” as a signal to his co-workers, constantly touching them on the back. The wait staff developed the illusion of closeness because of this physical proximity, but spending time together outside of work, realized they had little or nothing to say to one another. Still, in that proximity, that closeness, there was beauty.
“We all know, for ourselves, what beauty is,” said Manuel. “What I always found beautiful was loneliness and darkness – the austere. I write about Chicanos in the Central Valley – that’s not beautiful.” Richard was on the same page, since he celebrated conquistadores in his work – with all their genocide and trampling, he said, “they’re really shiny.” And he’s right. Conquistadores are really shiny.
Ugly and beautiful are not opposites. Ugly is exciting for many authors, and ugly beauty is “highly vested,” said Richard. He argued, “there are a lot of things you don’t want to put words around. If you don’t believe in the sacred, sit down and make a list of all the things you won’t write about and you’ll realize you believe in the sacred.” He went on to argue that people want two things, to belong and not to be left behind. If we, as writers, can make sense of either of those two, people will listen to us and find it beautiful. But if we pretend that something is beautiful when we don’t think it is, our readers will be able to tell.
Authenticity is hard to come by, and sometimes comes about through odd means. For a long time, Manuel did not write stories with people’s names in them. He had gotten the reaction too many times – “Who the fuck is Ancelmo?” He resorted to pronouns and realized “the woman next door” was much closer to Chicano reality than naming names all the time. It put the woman in relation to others and created an interconnectedness that came closer to what he was trying to express. At this point Richard changed his mind from what he started with. “Beauty doesn’t come in units. Maybe beauty happens within connections, but not in things.”
When asked for closing remarks, Richard warned us about process and the dangers of creating beauty. ”Somehow you have to take the world in and let it out. Generate your text. It’s much easier to revise towards beauty. If you end up creating beauty, people will hold you to it. They will celebrate you or get aggressive; they may not allow you to change.” His advice: “Stay as liquid as you can and as centered as you can.”
PS NOTES
Manuel suggests reading, as a work of beauty, Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, even though half the people he recommends it to end up hating it
