Indeed there are those who wrote their Magnum Opus and left them in our heads for all literary quotes and situational similies. But here is a poet/writer who has come out with a book called “300 arguments”. It is but 90 pages long and has short sentences...are they aphorisms or is that poetry?
Answers Sarah Manguso, the author, “Well, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with someone who called any of these poetry. I would disagree with those who called them fragments, though. That's something I am adamant about. These are not broken pieces of something that was once, in some earlier form, whole. Each of the arguments is complete in itself.”
As Manguso reads from her book, you know what she means. She writes, “There truly are two kinds of people — you and everyone else. The best form isn't always the most efficient form. I'm seldom bored at home, but I'm often bored while travelling. At home, where my daily routine is automatic enough that I can almost ignore it, I'm free to think about what I want.”
Now it may be easier to understand why the experience of reading her book is described as, “...like you’ve jumped into someone’s mind”.
Her few lines on motherhood take the cake, “I used to pursue the usual things — sex, drugs, rough neighbourhoods — in order to enjoy the feeling of wasting my life, of tempting danger. Motherhood has finally satisfied that hunger. It's a self-obliteration that never stops and that no one notices.”
Manguso says her book is actually an outcome of all the experiences she has faced. They give a micro view of what she experienced, a worry, an anxiety, something she could not stop thinking about.
Obliteration of self
Like about motherhood she says, “Well, motherhood — I mean is, in a way, the most punk rock thing you can do because it involves this obliteration of the self. I mean, it really is like walking into another room that has a one-way door and you can't get into it in any other way.
And I still feel I haven't found a satisfying way to really write about it so that anyone who isn't a mother doesn't just roll her eyes and think, great, here's some more sanctimonious sentimentality about motherhood, which is exactly how I probably would have heard much of the writing that I have since done on motherhood. So that's something that's still worrying me, that's still eating at me.”
If you are a mother you surely will find a chuckle in your throat as you read her lines above. Even if you are not a mother, maybe a father or maybe no parent at all, here is another page from Sarah Manguso’s book that rings so true. “Perfect happiness is the privilege of deciding when things end. But then you have to find a new happiness.”
So much for the whims of the human mind and the art of penning them down.
sudhamahi@gmail.com
Web site:
http://www.npr.org/2017/02/05/513532418/reading-300-arguments-is-like-jumping-in-someones-mind
