Quarry #3: Oh, bother

Or, query.

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It’s taken me way too long to realize that the form proper to this website is, above all, epistolary. Often what prompts me to open up a new draft is a shimmering feeling, a kind of rush, a gathering of certain words, which propels me to this space. An incipience begins to overwhelm me, so I try to put something down and send it your way. Everything I have shared to date (excepting one or two pieces) has been written in this spirit of immediacy.

Lydia Davis, in her essay Into the Weeds, says that the reason she writes is because something, either in her mind or in the world, bothers her. The way, she says, Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror “immediately grabbed and bothered” John Ashbery. That bother lasted years, until Ashbery finally did something about it and wrote his poem of the same name. We are glad he did.

But there is something almost unappealing about the term bother as the source of a text, as though it were somehow dissimulating. Could we really say that something bothered Melville into writing Moby-Dick? That Sappho was simply bothered to compose her poems? It feels trivial, even mechanical. A response of the nervous system. But I think it’s just the term for the experience in question.

The bothered space is an obscure space. Maybe you don’t comprehend something. Maybe you feel the urge to share it. These two things are the result of an absence. The bothering can be a negative experience or a positive one. Moments ago, for instance, I looked out the window and had the distinctly pleasant sensation of observing the late afternoon light on the dome of the bank across the street. The light bothered me. Its visual presence fixed in me a need, which is an absence. By relating it to you, I went someway towards resolving the situation. Visual presence opens into absence, compelling the made presence of language (or paint, marble, music, plants, trees). If the bother is allowed to fester, to evolve into an obsession, it can result in a great work of art.

“With an apple I want to astonish Paris.” Apples. Oil on canvas, 9 in x 13 in. Paul Cézanne.