Writing The “I”, by Tara Goedjen and Brian Oliu

For all who like talking about writing, here’s another exquisite corpse (a hybrid piece of prose traded back and forth). Below we briefly explore what it means to write the “I” in non-fiction.

She can only write about herself through a kaleidoscope, through horn-rimmed glasses that warp reality. In this way, self-examination is possible. In this way, imagination is possible.

In her dreams, she tells herself to remember the plot. “This would make a great movie…This here is a story…These are lines of poetry,” her dream-self whispers before she awakes.  Her sleeping-dreams edge into her work. Her waking-dreams are written on her calendar.

For her, fiction writing is a world she slips into. Fiction writing is a story about the world surrounding the writer. Whereas with nonfiction, the writer is the story, she thinks.

The two become inseparable, like conjoined twins. This seems daunting to her.

The “I” is too direct, she feels, the “I” dominates the page. The “I” seeks attention. It is a needy vowel, it draws out for so long, iiiiiiiiiiiiii. It is a sigh, iiiiiiiiiii, which exhausts her creativity. Who wants to hear about I? There are so many of us after all. This is what she thinks. She is not infallible, remember.

This is a true story, the nonfiction writer says, I wrote it. This story has truth, the fiction writer says, it came to me. She thinks there is a difference between the two. Remember, she is not infallible. She feels the distinction most at her fingertips. They will not willingly write the “I”. They refuse.

This is what happens when you dream in third person; when you see moments occur not through the eyes of the watcher, but through the eyes of someone who can do nothing, someone rendered inert.  When you think about this now, writing, you imagine you sitting at a desk.

Sometimes the lens shifts to show the side of a nose, a semi-colon, a dash, but it never focuses head on, and there are, still more, movements of sound where nothing happens and nothing is said.  The “I” becomes a you, a character, a nothing, and that’s how it works sometimes, you holding place, the I the placeholder, the place where the I and the you exist, but do not exist directly, only in side glances and the back of a head and a shirt collar.

When you remember a room, you remember walking across its floors, turning to look at the wallpaper, the window.  You do not remember walking through it.

The “I” becomes a black speck, something seen at a distance: the “I” becomes debris in the vitreous humor, that floating black dot that interrupts the line of sight, the sentence, and is yet, always part of it. The writing cannot be separated from it, this “I”. It exists in the very word: writing.

Writing the I is: also observing the wallpaper and window, the very ones you just walked past. Writing the I is: when you see someone else through the glass and they call out your name.

You wonder if there is some vast thematic thread that is sewn through the written word, from desk to desk, from dream to dream. You don’t wonder. You know of such a quilted thing (IIIII) and that it is impenetrable to moths, and timeless. There is room in its folds for all the I’s in the world. You know all of this when you sit at a desk to write and realize that you are not only writing about yourself—from a place always loosely or tightly tethered to the “I”—but that you are also writing about your mother, your neighbor, the girl on the bus with the tattered shirt collar. The bus driver too, the one who took off his hat to show you his balding head with the pink, s-shaped scar.

If the “I” is a wall it has been painted green.  Consider the dash–an I on its side, toppled over like a pillar; consider the slash, a self falling/flailing.  To separate the “I” from ourselves is to separate language of ourselves, specifically the language of text and the tools that we use to try to get people we don’t know to understand where our faces have been or what the weather was like the day that someone died.  It is, yes, about us, about I–a pole, a magnet that stands to draw in opposites–the way a moth is drawn to a light.  The way we understand how records contain memories.  A world constrained by wood and glass.

You will like what I have to say if you like dirt.  You will like what I have to say if you are the one that has found it on the floor somewhere, in a garbage can on a street corner, or in a shopping cart.  I cannot give you these things.  If you find them, you will believe them:  you will take what is said to heart–you will ignore the clever shifts in language and spacing–you will find the loops in letters comforting, the swirls, the straight lines. You will know what I am doing but not know what the I does.