*This little analytical essay stuck in the creative/homework birth
canal for a whole two weeks and I couldn’t muster the strength to find
some sort of inspiration to write anything about it, although the
anthology is amazing, and John D’Agata’s introductory “rolling” essay
that accompanies each piece, is equally as informing and
inspirational. I did however read 48 essays worth of life reflections
and historical thinkers from cultures all over the world, so trying to
synthesize a body of work that big is like trying to fit a horse in a
cup of water or whatever.
Anyway.
Below, is a draft the I need to put down for awhile and come back to.
I have learned from this leviathan that analyzing the work of smaller
pieces is more fluent and gratifying and yields higher quality
academic papers/observations than trying to “book report” so much
material. For now its on the internet in it’s poor state, but on life
support until I come back to it.
John D’Agata explains, in a note to the reader, that the origin of the
essay may have started nearly six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia.
According to D’agata the Sumerians were the people who invented
civilization. The people who invented agriculture, kilns, alcohol,
wheels, the first cities, the first government, and the first legal
codes. “Their inventions became so numerous,” he says “and their
prosperity so abundant, that the Sumerians actually needed accounting,
too, and so they produced a rudimentary series of small notches in
clay that we recognize today as the first system of writing.” The
earliest written accounts were records of trade and commerce. “Indeed,
it’s estimated that over 90 percent of what the Sumerians wrote down
only served an administrative function…Writing in other words, began
as nonfiction .” He explains that the efficiencies that writing
introduced to the Sumerian Markets helped the Sumerians become the
richest people in the world. The gods suddenly noticed this
prosperity, paying special attention to the huge apartment blocks,
butchers, prostitutes, beggars, and the “ceaseless shapeless
clattering of the who-what-when-where-why,” deciding to lay waste to
the cradle of civilization by flooding the rivers surrounding Sumer.
“Its embarrassing, of course, to think nonfiction destroyed the
world,” D’agata says. “especially since some readers are still
suspicious of the form: a genre that is merely a dispensary of Data
–not the true expression of one’s dreams, ideas or fears.”
Here, if there was such a thing as a thesis in his writing, he says
it here, and at this stage in our exploration of the essay, we have no
choice, but to take up arms with him:
Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read
it to experience art? It’s not very clear sometimes. So this is a book
that will try to offer the reader a clear objective: I am here in
search of art. I am here to track the origins of an alternative to
commerce.
The first essay in D’Agata’s anthology (included as the prologue)
leaves off after the flood in Sumer. It is a list written by a
Sumerian named Ziusudra. In it, he will catalogue the problems that he
witnessed in the past by offering some advice about the future. “I
think his list is the beginning of an alternative to nonfiction,”
D’Agata says. “The beginning of a form that’s not propelled by
information, but one compelled instead by individual expression –by
inquiry, by opinion, by wonder, by doubt. Ziusudra’s list is the first
essay in the world. It’s a minds inquisitive ramble through a place
wiped clean of answers. It is trying to make a new shape where there
previously was none.”
What comes next is an exhaustive romp through nearly five thousand
years of history compressed into 48 essays. In fragments, Heraclitus
of Ephesus explains, “those who wish to know about the world must
learn about it in details.” In 105 B.C.E., Lucias Seneca, Rome’s
revered philosopher writes letters that reveal a man so unsure of
himself that he contemplates suicide: “We are lit and put out,” Seneca
says in his essay called Sick. “We are born to die. We suffer a little
in the intermission, but on either side of life I know there is a deep
tranquility. I know that death doesn’t follow but it proceeds as
well.” More than a thousand years later, in the essay My Journey Up
The Mountain, Francesco Petrarch, recalls his journey up a mountain.
In a rolling essay that accompanies every historical essay
chronologically in the book, D’Agata explains that Petrarch’s writing
as a “great mimetic demonstration of a mind ascending something as the
body does the same,” but asks “what if it is only Petrarch’s mind that
is doing the ascending?” In 1969, Natalia Ginzburg writes about the
mendacities of her relationship, within the cultural confines of
fascist Italy. Somewhere in that five thousand years or so, Montaigne
asks, “what do I know?”
What do we arrive at from reading this body of work?
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