i think you are a whole city
by earle birney

i think you are a whole city
and yesterday when i first met you
i started moving
thru one of your suburbs
where all the gardens are fresh
with faces of you
flowering up

some girls are only houses
maybe a village
woman you are miles
of boulevards with apple trees
unpruned and full of winding
honesties

so give me time i want
i want to know
all your squares and circuses
im steering now by a constellation
winking up on this nights rim
from some great avenue of you
with highrisers and a floodlit
beaux arts

i can hear your beating centre
will i make it
are there maps of you
i keep circling the rim
imagining
parks galleries your great stores

back now in my lodgers bed
i wander
your stranger
dreaming i am
your citizen

i think you are a whole city by Earle Birney is, I think, a beautiful poem. I have a readerly, emotional, non-rational affection for it. An affection completely unlike the cerebral appreciation I have for Anne Carson’s work, say, or Marianne Moore’s syllabics, or Malouf’s cool urbanity, although I believe it is a marvelously intelligent, textured, supple and exciting poem. At least, I think it is; I have known it too long to be able to say, with any rational, academic detachment, whether it is, indeed, a ‘good’ poem. It’s one of those poems I’ve carried around with me for a long time. Ever since a typed-out copy of it was given to me, as a gift, rolled up and tucked into my pillowcase, I’ve felt this personal, even private, love for it. I wanted to share it with you because it is/was the beginning (one of the many beginnings) of the novel I’ve just finished writing and sent off to my agent.

I’ve been asked often enough - as have most writers who stick their heads above the battlements long enough to be asked anything at all - where my ideas come from. It’s a question that confuses me more the more I am asked it. ‘Where’ seems to indicate a place - imaginary or otherwise - in which ideas rest, awaiting resurrection. And the ‘get’ (an ugly verb if ever there was one) with its active, abrupt force, seems to imply that an author actively acquires these ideas, in the way, say, of a knight who violently rescues a maiden from the clutches of a dragon.

When I was first asked this question I tried to answer it honestly and earnestly. I drew connections between things I read, things I experienced, and things I imagined. I didn’t realise until some time later that these three forms of inspiration corresponded quite neatly with Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of narrative - in particular, with what he called the ‘triple circle of mimesis’. For Ricoeur, life and literature are fundamentally connected ways of experiencing the world; in writing (and reading) stories, we live in a world of story or, as he puts it, ‘in the mode of the imaginary’. We live our lives - and understand them - as though they are always already stories. The difference, of course, is that although in life we can be our own narrator and hero, and are hopefully the main characters in our own lives, we cannot be our own authors.

Ricoeur has written a great deal about the ways in which life and literature intersect, but the aspect I want to look at most closely, and which connects with this basic idea of where ideas come from, is Ricoeur’s notion of triple mimesis. Ricoeur talks about three aspects of writing: mimesis I, mimesis II, and mimesis III.

Mimesis I is the understanding of experience - it translates quite neatly into the common sense version: write what you know.

Mimesis II is the understanding of emplotment - that is, your intuitive and intellectual understanding of what story is, how it works, how it makes sense of the mess of life through re-imagining and reinterpreting the events of your life as reflections, subversions, reactions to the stories you read.

Mimesis III is the understanding of effect - that is, writing what interests you, what you invent because it comforts or sustains you. He wrote:

the more imagination deviates from that which is called reality in ordinary language and vision, the more it approaches the heart of the reality which is no longer the world of manipulable objects, but the world into which we have been thrown by birth and within which we try to orient ourselves by projecting our innermost possibilities upon it, in order that we dwell there.

Mimesis III is the rich, storied world of your imagination. It is where you really live. It is where you refigure your world, and you reconfigure the world of narrative. For Ricoeur, fiction is only completed in life, and life can only be understood through the stories we tell about it: they are intimately related, co-dependent entities that are incomplete without each other. They are the separate but connected beats of the human heart.

That all sounds kind of complicated, so I’d like to step back a little and just deal with Ricoeur’s triple circle of mimesis and how it answers that bog-standard question of where ideas come from. In plain English, Ricoeur’s triple circle becomes the notion that our ideas emerge from three major domains:

• experience - the mess and push and pull of unstoryed, lived existence as you experience it;
  
• reading/listening - the stories you know, are told, read and respond to, consciously or not; and
  
• the interaction between stories and life - the ways in which they make and unmake each other.

The novel I’ve just finished writing (and therefore reading) is one I’ve been writing for about four years now. Or, at least, that’s the period of time during which I’ve had a notebook with her name on it, and a file on my computer with the same name. In reality, I’ve been writing this book my whole life, just as it’s been writing me.

It began, if stories ever begin in a single place, with that Early Birney poem. I cannot easily explain the movement in my heart when I read that poem now. It is the first poem that was read to me, the first poem that was given to me, the first poem I owned, the first poem I felt (rather than thought) I understood. Though, all these years later, I am still discovering its meanings. It is an instance of Mimesis II, of course, it is a thing read and understood - at least partially. It is also, for me, a trace of an experience - in fact, a whole set of personal experiences - about which I find I must write: it is evidence of Mimesis I. It is also, for me, an instance of Mimesis III. It has written me. It has made sense of things I cannot understand, even now. It has formed me, subtly, quietly, invisible perhaps.

I’ll be more concrete. More specific! This poem was given to me when I was a child - and not a woman - by a man who loved me. And then, dear reader, he died. I have variously understood this poem as his prayer, his invocation, his instruction, his hope. His confusion. His absolution. His politics. I have understood it to be about me, and about my mother, and about my sister. And about the man who gave it to me, and his mother, wife, lover, sister. About aesthetics, poetics, politics and prose. About cities, about citizenship, about dreams. About love. Most definitely, always, about love. It is mysterious, complex, confounding. I have given it away but it always, like the magic pudding, remains complete.

It is about transformation. About how our interiority always exceeds our exteriority. About how we are always mysterious, even to ourselves. About how we cannot be mapped, will not stay the same, about how we are the repository of things as insubstantial as dreams, and as concrete as kisses. About how complete and unknowable we are, each of us.

This poem - a copy of it, anyway - is pasted into my notebook. I carry it in my wallet. The translation here - the translation I was given by my father - I have never been able to find again. In fact, when I went to the library to find and read more of the poet’s poems, I discovered that this translation is not in print anywhere. I don’t know where it came from. This poem does not exist. The translation in the collected poems of Mr Birney bears a similar, but uncomfortable relation to the one reproduced here. It is like a twin sister you never knew existed who turns up and says she is the one you know. This, too, this experience of familiar unfamiliarity - of the Freudian Uncanny/hiemlich - is part of the book that I have just finished writing, or that has just finished writing me. Or, perhaps, that I have only just begun to write.

Today, I am struck by my new novel’s redundancy. Today, in the hours after having sent the manuscript out into the world, I am laid low by the ordinary horror of writerly despair. I am convinced it is a pointless waste of paper. I want to retract it. I want to write to my agent and say: don’t read the book, it’s redundant. Here, here’s a poem. Read it, instead.

Further Reading
Paul Ricoeur. Time and Narrative Volume 1. translated by K McLaughlin and D Pellauer. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1983.
Paul Ricoeur. ‘Life in Quest of Narrative.’ in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. edited by Daniel Wood. Baltimore. John Hopkins University Press, 1987.

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