Curiouser and Curiouser: Q&A with Rebecca Brown
by AMANDA MANITACH November 13, 2012
One of the (literally) more curious parts of the Moment Magnitude exhibit at Frye Art Museum is writer Rebecca Brown’s small fleet of curiosity cabinets that have been transported from the Capitol Hill studio where she writes. The wunderkammers are stuffed with books, little finger puppets (mostly of writers like Melville and Kafka), marionettes, small animal skulls, figurines of dogs, wolves, rosaries and flashcards of Catholic saints. These literary reliquaries are flanked by books pinned open to offer just a glimpse of what must comprise thousands of pages fastidiously altered, painted, drawn on, crossed out: erasures. Romantic themes of obsession run deep.
You have a lot of altered books filled with erasures. Whole pages or paragraphs graphically blotted out with blocs of green or blue or red ink. How do you relate to the visual presence of words vs the spoken or abstract word?
As a writer I’m envious of the physicality of visual art, color, the same way I’m envious of the physicality of music I can feel in my chest or throbbing through the floor. There are ways words are the most colorless and abstract of things, and a lot of this cut n paste stuff I do when I’m flustered, when I can’t get through, when I need to get out of a mode of verbal abstraction.
Does it start out as phrasical nonsense for you?
No, it starts as a rhythmic phrase very often. Like I’ve had this phrase that’s been going through my head for about a year and a half “She thought she was in love again, she was afraid she was in love with him.” It’s like the rhythm has meaning and I’ve been trying to push it in many directions. Some day it will probably make a story, but I can’t be sure.
And the erasures are part of the process of coaxing out the story?
After my parents died I couldn’t write for about a year. I had this old book, The Mortal Storm. I went through and I tried to pull out the story of their deaths. I couldn’t come up with my own words, so it was like finding my stories elsewhere. The book became The MortalS. I never thought of this stuff as art, and I still don’t, but now that it’s in a museum, I’m nervous about it and I wonder, “is it art?” which is very different from “I’m exhausted, I don’t want to use my brain, I’m going to use this as a technique and or for play…”
Why all the dogs? There are figurines, books, and this collage of rather vicious-looking black dogs.
In 1986 I was going through some things. I had a very strong perception—not quite a vision—of being surrounded by black dogs. I thought, “you know what, you are in trouble.” I left the country, pursued images of dogs for a couple of years, then eventually wrote a book called The Dogs. So this collage was a conscious gesture.
Are the dogs still with you or did pursuing and writing about them exorcise them?
I feel like I live with the dogs now, usually in peace. Dogs and wolves have begun reappearing in my work again recently, so it’s pretty consistent personal mythology. But the dogs don’t have a power over my they once did. Everyone’s got their own personal obsessions and mythologies, whether it’s the color red or high heels, like I have seen in your work, or whatever.
Where did you get the life-size saint?
My mother was a social worker in Fort Worth, Texas, and they were de-consecrating a church and throwing the statue away. My mother rescued it and kept it for 20 years till she died, then it came to live with us. Only recently did someone identify it as Saint Vincent de Paul. Before he was just “the Saint.” Good enough for me. I love that he is holding a Franz Kafka marionette puppet. I’ve felt like that a lot…
I notice amongst all this stuff you have Gertrude Stein reading her own works. Listening to Stein reading Stein is one of my favorite things in the world.
It’s phenomenal isn’t it? It’s meaningful while irrational. She’s been profoundly important to me; I’ve written about her a few times.
And no one else could read her work quite the same way. How do you feel about hearing your own work read aloud?
My own work is very lyrical. I count syllables. A lot of time when I read aloud, people will say, “oh I loved your poem!” But it’s not a poem, it’s prose. But the different rhythms are very important in writing, AND the aural shape of something is very important to me, to make a bodily experience as well as an abstract experience with content.
Did you ever speak in tongues?
Oh, no.
I grew up around it. I find glossolalia has an interesting relationship to that kind of bodily experience originating in the rhythm of language.
I can imagine being drawn in by the pre-logical, ecstatic babbling of syllables. It’s like altered states, sexual ecstasy. People have a desire to get outside of themselves.
Whose glasses are those?
I wore glasses since the age of two and a half and those were mine. And seeing things wrong is something I’m interested in. Also mishearing things. I’m intensely aware that everything I see is mediated through something else, is mediated by a tool, and that’s fascinating.
And a volume of Balzac….
He died of caffeine poisoning. Isn’t it crazy? He was a madman of writing. I visited his house…there’s a leaf tucked in an envelope in this cabinet. It’s a leaf I took from Balzac’s yard. And that is a stone from Top Withens, the farm Wuthering Heights was based on. So I have a leaf from Balzac’s yard and a stone from Top Withens. They’re like saint’s relics.
What is your relationship to Catholicism? Is it about the ritual or is spiritual?
I have a profound sense of Mystery with a capital M. One of the things about Catholicism that’s so necessary for me is the sacraments, visible signs that say we’re trying to make or do something with our bodies, something that represents something about something we don’t understand. (All those ‘somethings’ are intended, by the way!) The symbols of ritual mean something to me about the mystery we live with though we can’t understand it. But that we need to figure out how to live with…being Catholic feels inevitable to and for me.
You can see Rebecca Brown’s wunderkammers at Frye Art Museum through January 20, 2013. She’ll also be at Town Hall on Sunday, November 18, 2012 along with Christopher Frizzelle, Lesley Hazelton and Aham Oluo to discuss the writerly art of “killing your darlings.”
Photo credit: Spike Mafford