THE VAST EXTENT, Lavinia Greenlaw

A work of mournful autotheory. The theme is sight and how we see, and also how we don’t see things, and how we remember. I seem to have accidentally read a lot of sad essay-books this year.

Here’s what attracted me to it:

I wanted to keep alive the nature of my practice, which is to travel the question rather than try to answer it, and then to unsettle my subjects so that they tilted a little as in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘… tipping/of an object toward the light’.1 My intention has been to draw things to the surface, place them in arrangement while keeping the parts apart, and to leave the reader free to cast their own light and to turn these things over in their own mind as I have in mine. I’ve come to think of this form as the exploded essay, and a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge. Each is a series of short texts that cast light on one another rather like the aspects of a poem. They align artworks, myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny, reminiscence and a poet’s response.

Exploded essays.

I like to be taken to the edge of my understanding and language and ideas, and to have my mind slowed so that I can experience what I would describe as wonder. Something has such an impact that I detect a moment of emptiness before the brain rushes in to build an explanation. A moment of wonder is a tremendous relief. There are no words. I can rest now.

She will find a thing she’s interested in, and interview experts about them. Often, they look for a poetic explanation for her, as Greenlaw is a poet, which sometimes comes off a little condescending. But she does look for the poetic in science, like me, and an odd scientific term will thrill her:

I met a Finnish psychiatrist who was an expert in Arctic Personality Disorder. He said that darkness is less of a problem than the cold, which makes the body hoard blood around the heart, depriving the brain. He explained that the Arctic personality is characterised by sisu – adaptability and perseverance. Such people had a tendency to be greedy, stingy and ruthless. They hoarded information, were suspicious of strangers and ‘sexually specialised’.

She marbles her explorations of sight (photography, cinema, the eye, painting) with personal notes of loss and mourning: she wants to be the human observer, not the omniscient narrator. It sets a peculiar tension between the expert exploratory and the personal, and the latter feels like a strain to occupy the commercial space of autofiction rather than a natural extension of the themes. That said, those digressions are sometimes charming and sometimes she manages to hook them directly into the book’s main engine.

She’s a wonderful writer, observer and gatherer, and in general these essays are models to be studied. I’ve read very little like it, though it could be usefully stored next to CAIRN and THE WHITE BOOK and LIMBO.

THE VAST EXTENT, Lavinia Greenlaw (UK) (US+)