our lives

recently, our class has gone through the final text of the semester: lyn hejinian’s, “my life.” though it was introduced as being semi-autobiographical, we discussed the ways in which it is more autographical than anything else. hejinian tends to create self as she writes, skipping around in a way that seems haphazard but perhaps has a much higher purpose. as far as i am concerned, the book seems as though it was written to make the reader to step outside of themselves and observe their own lives in the way that she observes “her” life (i use quotations purely because the text does not necessarily follow her exact life story --- hence its pseudo-autobiographical nature).

each chapter of my life is structured so that the title is arranged into a small, box-like form in the corner like a stamp. we speculated that perhaps these titles could be read separately from the book itself as one extensive poem. in order to further explore this, i took the liberty of typing out each title as a single line. the results are as follows:

“A pause, a rose / something on paper
As for we who “love to be / astonished”
It seemed that / we had hardly / begun and we were / already there
A name trimmed / with colored / ribbons
What is the / meaning hung / from that depend
The obvious / analogy is with / music
Like plump birds / along the shore
The inevitable / sentiment is / a preliminary
What memory is / not a “gripping” / thought
We have come / a long way from / what we actually / felt
It is hard to / turn away from / moving water
I wrote my name / in every one of / his books
Religion is a / vague lowing
Any photographer / will tell you / the same
At the time / the perpetual Latin / of love kept / things hidden
She showed the / left profile, / the good one
It was only a / coincidence
When one travels, / one might “hit” / a storm
Such displacements / alter illusions, / which is / all-to-the-good
The coffee / drinkers answered / ecstatically
We are not / forgetting the / patience of the / mad, their love / of detail
Reason looks for / two, then / arranges it / from there
I never swept / the sand from / where I was going / to sit down
No puppy or dog / will ever be / capable of this, / and surely no / parrot
The greatest / thrill was / to be the one / to tell
The plow makes / trough enough
The years pass, / years in which, / I take it, events / were not lacking
So upright, / twilit quoted
Yet we insist / that life is full / of happy chance
The settling-in / that we’re describing is a / preliminary to / being blown up
I laugh as if my / pots were clean
A somewhat / saltier, earthier / tomato grows / there and is / more seductive
There is no / “sameness” of / the sky
One begins as a / student but / becomes a friend / of clouds
At a moment of / trotting on only / one foot in so / much snow
If there’s / nothing out the / windows look / at books
The run, that if / you broke it, / you’d have none
Now such is / the rhythm / of cognition
Preliminaries / consist of / such eternity
My morphemes / mourned events
Skies are the / terrains of this / myopic
And I in the / middleground / found
The world gives / speech substance / and mind (mile) / stones
A word to guard / continents of / fruits and organs
‘Altruism / in poetry’”

there you have it. all forty-five chapters.

i’d like to end this post with a final thought that occurred to me in class the other day:
the title of this book, considering the fact that it is not hejinian’s authentic life experience, fascinates me. the reader is able to place themselves into the text with such ease that i imagine it’s meant to say, in a sense, “my life.” not just her life but all of our lives, if that makes sense. say this book is given as a gift to person B by person A.

person B: what is this?
person A: my life.


… make sense?