Response to prompt 3: “On writing field notes; ‘To make gods of men and poetry of situations.’”

(A reflection on a prompt, a working-though, an auto-ethnographic account of familial medical record-keeping in a time of illness. February of 2016, for the Celestial Emporium of Uncertain Knowledge, a 3-month writing-and-keeping-relations experiment of The Thought Collective.)

Somewhere within the linked digital file cabinet of my smartphone and laptop computer lies a document, never too far out of reach, entitled, "Notebook of Beautiful Phrases.” Filling its proverbial pages is a repository of lines materialized from a walk to the office, an exquisite pairing of two pairs of words, misheard song lyrics, a paraphrased utterance from an interview with a favorite singer-songwriter: “Confusing acolytes for accolades;” “tattooed youth/wilderness songs”; “drinking pink granite;” “To make gods of men and poetry of situations.”

Most of these beautiful phrases make it into the songs I write in various transfigurations. Some eventually find their place at the back half of verses, while others lay fallow fixing imaginative nitrogen, sitting unused for months, and others still remain content to have simply brought themselves into being at the confrontation of language and life. I started keeping this notebook years ago as a sort of sacrament to the richness of the everyday, inspired by yet another favorite musician who’s said to keep the same habit, albeit in a little journal bound in red.

I find the practice of living that brings forth this collection of words not unlike the practice of writing field notes. Both involve taking joy in details, in representation and the fashioning of images from an ethereal reality. And yet in the practice of my writing field notes—during observation, or immediately after interviews—the two techniques could hardy be more different. Whereas the “Notebook of Beautiful Phrases” finds purpose in producing fragments—a pair of words, one line—my field notes, inspired by the purpose of my being there, often seem to burst forth in complete clauses with which my hand and my pen struggle to keep up.

The knowledge produced by these field notes form the narrative structure on which I eventually hang the little moments of revelation that are destined to bloom from them many weeks or months later. From the act of inclusion and exclusion inevitable to the processes of observation and writing bursts forth figures fashioned from past experiences and anticipated futures.¹ What happens in the act of writing it down is no less the creation of worlds.

In a short section of my Masters thesis, I wrote of French philosopher and philologist, Pierre Hadot—a sometimes inspiration to, sometimes critic of Foucault—and his essay in The Veil of Isis² on what he calls “The Orphic Attitude” of relating to Nature in the West, from antiquity to the early twentieth-century, in poetry, discourse and art. Hadot follows Plato's image of the universe as poem to the act of creation in the poetic work via the musician-poet-prophet, Orpheus.

He cites, among others, the philosophical and anthropological work of French linguist Émile Benveniste³ (“The poet causes things to exist, and things are born in his song") and the German lyrical poet Ranier Maria Rilke,⁴ who wrote—in the same year that Malinowski published Argonauts of the Western Pacific —“Gesang ist Dasein.” Song is existence.

I used this brief exegesis to explain how, faced with the enormity of the inevitable political and environmental changes to come, as well as those that have already come to pass, my interlocutors who work between climate science and action take up the act of creation and, like Hadot’s Orphic poet, fashion worlds of human possibility. I’m going to insist now that in the inclusionary/exclusionary act of keeping a record of what happens in the field, we put into practice a means not only of knowing the world, but of recreating it. The poet sings the world into being—no matter which images we do or do not succeed to fashion from the shifting landscape of the field.

∆∆∆

Two weeks ago tomorrow, after an appointment to follow-up on GI issues resulting from his daily aspirin dose to combat ischemic events, Larry E. Fleischmann, was found to have cancerous spots on his liver. He was scheduled for a week of inpatient tests starting the following Monday and three days later was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer which had metastasized to the liver, with mets found all over the abdomen. Median survival rate is six to twelve months with treatment—meaning 50% of the people live longer than this and 50% shorter. He started chemotherapy on Friday but nonetheless a day later reacted badly. With a drop in blood pressure and rising potassium levels due to the kidney and GI issues that brought him to be tested in the first place, he ended up in the ICU, under the care not of oncology, but the departments of nephrology, pulmonary medicine and gastroenterology, where he remains today.

I know all this in clinical detail (of which I’ve spared you the majority), not only because of the verbal reports from my very knowledgeable family, but because my father, in town last weekend to celebrate the triumvirate of February Fleischmann birthdays, has subsequently stayed in town and chosen to keep some field notes of his own: a Google Docs file, updated daily by himself or my mother (divorced, their lives yet entwined), entitled “LEF Cancer,” named after his father, my one remaining granddad, addressed as “Dad” throughout. A coping mechanism, a mnemonic record, a way to keep immediate family informed, these field notes have proved useful in making visible, legible, a personal history of illness that could otherwise have found itself lost to the vagaries of emotion, mutual support, an aging sick body.

Yet in their transparency they conceal an emotional burden of their own. My father, in the days since “Dad” has been admitted to the ICU, found it difficult to maintain them with everything else on the plate. Subsequently, my mother, his ex-wife, a nurse practitioner, has kept up the habit of the field notes in her own vocabulary, a mixture of technical language, professional hypotheses and nursing abbreviations, interspersed with emoticons. In the lacuna between the words—which I fill in with phone conversations, or with tacitly gleaned silences between choked up words, all accomplished at a distance, from here, in Montreal—I find the professional and personal support of a mother, an ex-wife, the continued relations and obligations of a daughter-in-law; the struggles of a son and brother and father to balance his own emotions with the management of those of others, his mother’s, his brothers’, his sons’; the patients’ labor (patience-labor), most commonly familial, of managing the medical care of oneself or someone else, even for those privileged or well-versed in the labor of the other, clinical side; and the representations of an uncommunicated corporeal knowledge of my granddad’s illness, described second-hand by those physically nearest.

When considering how our objects of study or writing, and even our own note-taking technologies, shape the kind of writing or knowledge we can produce, I turn to this rather low and personal example to present another complication of the anxiety of self-imposed standards I find in the seam between §§§§§§§§’s questions about field notes. As you both, øøøøøø and §§§§§§§§, also seem to be suggesting, perhaps not writing things down produces its own knowledges, its own narrative structures on which to hang little moments of revelation. Perhaps the absences, too, sing the world into being.

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¹ "Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present, and I feel now
The future in the instant."
Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 5

²Hadot, Pierre. 2008. The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature. Translated by Michael Chase. Belknap Press.

³ Benveniste, Émile, 1969 Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. 2: Pouvoir, droit, réligion. Collection Le sens commun. Paris: Éd. de Minuit.

⁴ Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1922. “Die Sonette an Orpheus - Das III. Sonett.” Rilke.De. 1922. http://www.rilke.de/gedichte/das_iii_sonett.htm.