A few years ago I came upon this prose poem by Russell Edson:
The Bridge
In his travels he comes to a bridge made entirely of bones. Before crossing he writes a letter to his mother: Dear mother, guess what? the ape accidentally bit off one of his hands while eating a banana. Just now I am at the foot of a bone bridge. I shall be crossing it shortly. I don't know if I shall find hills and valleys made of flesh on the other side, or simply constant night, villages of sleep. The ape is scolding me for not teaching him better. I am letting him wear my pith helmet for consolation. The bridge looks like one of those skeletal reconstructions of a huge dinosaur one sees in a museum. The ape is looking at the stump of his wrist and scolding me again. I offer him another banana and he gets very furious, as though I'd insulted him. Tomorrow we cross the bridge. I'll write to you from the other side if I can; if not, look for a sign.
I felt a rush of delight as I read it; it was so playful and deliciously strange, and I thought for all its dream-like bizarreness, it is still doing the work of literary expression so effectively. Its words push into my brain and evoke a new world (albeit an odd one) and stir up a multitude of emotional and rational responses—“villages of sleep,” especially haunting and powerful. The newness of the thing (neither prose nor poem, so new it resists stock categories even) deepened and intensified my engagement with it.
I instantly started using it in my literature and creative writing classes. For lit classes, I loved that it offered so few stock handholds—no overt allusions, no typically “literary” images, no obvious way “in.” Still it is structurally familiar; it contains all of the standard elements of fiction—characters, plot, setting, conflict (or what Raymond Carver famously called “menace”). For my creative writing students, I had them attempt to write imitations, to resist any and all clichés or stock imagery, to let their subconscious minds tug them along, taking them to dream-like, surreal places they had not expected to go. Both groups struggled mightily. The literature students found nothing akin to Nick Carraway’s reflections on the nature of Gatsby’s dreams. The creative writers, try as they may, rarely came close to anything that resembled Edson’s universe, all too often letting the normative laws of ordinary, “realistic” reality impede their imaginative efforts.
My fascination with Edson goes beyond just the immediate love of his art. I discovered him in the late spring of 2014, and immediately went hunting for more of his work and information about him online. I found these words from an interview that instantly resonated: “My job as a writer is mainly to edit the creative rush. The dream brain is the creative engine…I sit down to write with a blank page and a blank mind. Wherever the organ of reality (the brain) wants to go I follow with the blue-pencil of consciousness.” When I came to Wikipedia, I was still more shaken to find that he had just recently died—right here in Connecticut not even an hour from my home. . . and on my very birthday, April 29th. All at once, it somehow seemed right that such a confluence of mysterious alignments would lead me to the discovery of a writer whose work is so thoroughly grounded in moments of dream-like eeriness.
And what do his prose-poem-things mean? What do they communicate?—these the questions many a baffled and frustrated student have asked over the years—which gave me the perfect opportunity to ask “what do you mean by ‘mean’?” Is “meaning” only that which can be reduced to rational expressions? Can we reach down into the midst of an art work and pluck out something else embedded inside of it, something the constructs of the artistic expression hide or shield? Is there/should there be something we call “hidden meaning” even?
“The Bridge” shows us a man on a journey encountering something ominous and new, a bridge made entirely of bones, apes who eat their own hands…. I feel not unlike him when I encounter Edson’s poems. I recognize all its parts—man, bridge, ape, banana, mother, pith helmet…—just as the man recognizes all the parts of the bridge, almost as if it were a “skeletal reconstruction of a huge dinosaur one sees in a museum.” But all the individual pieces have been rearranged, recast into something wholly new, something somehow both recognizable and unfamiliar all at once. The man’s response, a letter to his mother, introduces an effort to somehow put into words a summary and explanation of what is happening, to contend with it somehow with words, and as I read that I can’t help but feel that my own words here are a kind of letter to my mother, a reaching out to contain and express something ineffable to someone who matters. My own mother had died just a few years before I encountered this prose poem, and to this day, on a wholly personal level, this lovely, odd, comically nightmarish thing brings her to mind.…
Edson also brings to my mind the works of Remedios Varo, one of my favorite surrealist painters. I discovered her when teaching Thomas Pynchon’s masterful post modern novel, The Crying of Lot 49. His protagonist, Oedipa Maas (wife of Mucho Maas!), looks at Varo’s Bordando el Manto Terrestre (Embroidering the Earth’s Mantel) and starts to cry uncontrollably, her goggle-like sunglasses filling with her own tears and distorting everything she sees. I was both surprised and not surprised to discover that the painting Oedipa looked at in the novel was real—and I was also struck that my reaction to it (as with my reaction to Edson) was nearly at Oedipa’s level. The painting suggests that “reality” springs from what the central, masked woman is somehow conjuring by reading from her book—then stirring whatever is in that egg-like vessel with its tubes going out to each of the embroiderers. Though perhaps the whole of the expressive act really springs from the woman in the alcove in the background, head down (sleeping, dreaming?). For me the painting speaks to how the creative force of the human mind contends with the world all around us, and that through the act of creative invention (embroidery) the world becomes itself. In this sense, Edson, Varo (and so many other artists) work to help me understand the control and power we have to see the world as something new, something that is ours to shape, to stitch, to use, to cross over…. Our dream selves understand this, embroidering the day to day ingredients of our consciousness in new and unexpected ways every night as we spin down the normative hard drives of our minds and allow it to emerge. Edson, and I would argue all great artists, find ways to conjure up the essential elements from the subconscious vessels and approach the world as something both familiar and strange.
Perhaps we are “saddened” by life when we accept its limitations, when we don’t work to live according to our own dream-fueled embroiderings and conjurings. I’ll leave you with another Edson piece that may speak to just this:
The Reason Why the Closet-Man is Never Sad
This is the house of the closet-man. There are no
rooms, just hallways and closets.Things happen in rooms. He does not like things to
happen….Closets, you take things out of closets, you
put things into closets, and nothing happens…Why do you have such a strange house?
I am the closet-man, I am either going or coming, and
I am never sad.But why do you have such a strange house?
I am never sad…
*Find more of Edson’s poems HERE
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