Your Cheatin’ Art: Reading & Response
Peter Elbow’s Collage: Your Cheatin’ Art offers the writer several paths of liberation from the rules of writing. From the breaking of sentence structure and conventions of narrative coherence and consistency, Elbow deconstructs the process of assembly and editing by challenging the writer to free themselves of the traditional sense-making found in literature, and through the application of collage, assemble their writing into something potentially less coherent but ultimately more compelling and interesting. Within this, Elbow advocates the use of a framework of crots - brief passages and individualized thoughts - to construct a remixed order shaped by absence. Leaving negative space within a piece for the reader to draw their own connections, instead of explicitly joining thoughts together as we might find in academic papers. A process whereby removal invites more textured and individualized readings, and ultimately guides the writer towards more compelling and unexpected results in their work.
Taking Elbow’s approach and applying it to the six pieces I’ve written in class, I extracted a number of crots from my previous work, and assembled them into a collage which resulted in the creation of something for me which was completely unexpected. The work here is created by the extraction and editing of previous essays, but removes all but the passages I’ve chosen, echoing Elbow’s approach of focusing on the negative spaces between the individualized thoughts. I found the results compelling:
[ screams, then silence ]
Don’t wave. You’ll be waving goodbye. Don’t say you care. We all know you don’t.
At night I can hear you. I hear you breathing as you fall asleep next to me. Your closing thoughts on the events of the day. I hear what you wish you hadn’t said and how you thought long about it afterwards. I hear you standing up to him. I hear you say the words and be healed. You want to take it back but instead you gift it to me. I hear the regret in your voice as you talk about her. But you never talk to me like I talk to you. I ache for response but it’s never there. Presence without being present. All I want is the gift of you talking back. They called you still but I know you’re not. I know you have a name.
I remember all the stories and took everything to heart. I remember I should write it down.
A peaceful formula washes over the kitchen chaos. I can’t control it, but I can accept it. Anxiety as a means to come to terms with a past which doesn’t try to banish tough stains. Some plates have been in the sink for years, grown immune to soap. Some get wiped and set aside to drain. Dig deeper into the bottom of the pile. Draw out some of those older dishes. Youthful meals now turned to crusted mold.
You’re scared because you want to be with me too. She told me secrets hurt.
What took her was far worse. She had fallen into the poured concrete of the Brooklyn end’s support structure. The stronger her frustration to escape the deluge of cement now raining down upon her with desperate anguish, the deeper she sank. Like the grip of quicksand in the movies they both loved, her struggle only became a catalyst of her hastening death. As she screamed for the last time, the concrete filled her mouth, then her lungs, heavying her with the compromised quick-setting gumbo which would cause the project to hit its deadline. Her body entombed as fast as it had fallen.
I remember it all. I remember to tell her everything.
One day you’re gone. You’ve decided fifty years is enough and know this lesser has to find their germinated way alone. You’re all this lesser has ever known, but in the silence the half hasn’t been buried, it’s been planted. I don’t listen to your adventures any more. I write them down and others read them. I don’t smell the undernourished memory of you, but it helps me stay close. I don’t feel your touch but I do feel a guiding hand when I need it. A life lived as partial finally afforded the opportunity of completion. I know we have a name.
Don’t give up. There’s always time. Don’t start praying. He will not hear you.
But as he knelt down to retrieve it, he had made the fateful error of untethering himself to the safety harness which would usually hold him secure. Grasping only the fresh crisp air of the clear night, he stumbled backwards off the ledge which had been so familiar to him, but would now take his life. As he fell the two hundred feet between the crest and the river below, he caught the green pulse one last time before the icy river took him.
Some dishes I’ll never touch. They live in the sink, but are not of me. A place to be able to recall each dish, clean or not. Second, third, fourth generation concentrated cleans. A place of recollection but not a place of catharsis rinsed away. Not a place to neatly arrange the dishes as they soak, but a place to put the dishes aside. Only in the future does it become a means unto itself. Streak-free. But these are futures which never come. Meals never resolved.
This cumulative collaged essay takes a number of passages and mixes them into a gumbo of something new which leaves some fascinating negative spaces between the individual crots. It’s ‘cheating’ in Elbow’s sense that it borrows from writing already produced elsewhere, but remixes them into something new, an approach long normalized in music. However, as Elbow suggests, there are points of connection between the thoughts. There is a through-line of first person recollection. Elements of terror and catharsis. Of secrets and the untold stories we keep. What happens is that Elbow’s collage has afforded me the ability to extract, but also to see anew. It has created a distance borne out of a cumulative assembly whereby I can see my previous work in a new and energizing light. It adds unexpected dimension to my writing which I might never have arrived at before.
