Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

I worked on each of these pieces a stupidly long time, with a determination that was fueled, in part, by vanity. I wanted the writing to live an independent life and not rely on passing opinion or the ephemeral realities of alt-weeklies and magazines to make its way in the world. Rather insufferably I thought of myself as an essayist and bristled when friends and family, in conversation, referred to my published work as “articles.” The subjects of these pieces mattered, of course, but it was important to me that the sentences alone do the convincing. What this meant in actual practice was that I often had no idea what I was doing, no plan or sense of purpose, until I started putting words on paper. I relied on my ear to a ridiculous extent, trusting that if I got the sound right — the music, the mood, the feel of things — then sense might eventually make an appearance. Sometimes sense showed up, and other times, in that tussle of trial and error at the heart of all writing, error won the day. My instinctive and entirely private ambition was to capture the conflicted mind in motion, or, to borrow a phrase from Cioran, to represent failure on the move, so leaving a certain wrongness on the page was OK by me. The inevitable errors and imperfections made the trouble I encountered tactile, bringing the texture of experience into the story in a way that being cautiously right never could. In fact, as much as I wrote and rewrote many of these pieces, often, in a contrary mood, the goal of those revisions was to get the thing to read like a rough draft, cutting sonorities of thought and style that seemed dishonest, fighting against the insane clarity of public discourse or, in the more personal pieces, scraping away until I renewed my sympathies for raw subjects that time and habit had turned sclerotic.

Many of the ideas were mine, but just as often the impetus for these essays came to me in the form of assignments, which was always a rush, like being dropped behind enemy lines with nothing but a brick and a can of beans and the essayist’s motto: Que sais-je? Very often I knew nothing. That’s when the subject got its revenge, obligating me in ethical ways to justify my arbitrary presence in other people’s lives and to honor complex worlds, both foreign and familiar, that I’d never truly considered. Feeling helpless and lost and dumber by the draft, I did my best to leave an accurate record of what resisted me, of all that I didn’t understand, my little store of half-knowledge. Although I remember spending a long peaceful afternoon in the elegant hush of the Ryerson Library, reading books about brick, I rarely researched, preferring instead to work without a net — which may simply be another way of saying that I longed to fall. To fall, that is, and to hear what the descent had to say. “Bewilderment is the true comprehension,” Luther wrote. “Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge.” Truant in disposition, maybe I had no choice in the matter, but I took Luther’s exhortation to heart, embracing it in the spirit of a possibility. As a result, I’ve depended on my ignorance quite a bit, and maybe, just maybe, that gives the work a lopsided or eccentric shape and, at times, a certain velocity, a kind of venturi effect, as in an old carbureted engine, forcing the material through such a limited aperture of understanding — and I wouldn’t want to gunk up the works with irritable facts and information gathered from Google.

Friends would diagnose me with a really bad, likely terminal case of aporia, but I suspect that my condition isn’t so uncommon, that a little tribe of others feels, each in their own way, just as mystified and baffled as to direction as I do. At the risk of sounding parsonic, it seems to me we’ve ceded so much space to the expert and the confident authority that expressions of real doubt or honest ignorance are now regarded, in the demotic mind, as a kind of recreancy, a failure of loyalty, the sign of a faith betrayed. Our public space has become a matter of allegiances, always a prelude to ugly business, and as I worked on these pieces — stalled out, staring at the mess of contradictory notes tacked to my corkboard — I would wonder, in my uncertainty, where all the other people are who don’t know, who don’t understand. Are we — the hesitant, the conflicted — all alone? Can that be? In a leveling climate of summations, crowded with public figures who speak exclusively from positions of final authority, issuing an endless stream of conclusions, I get a wary sense in my gut of a world that’s making its appeal to my indolence and emptiness, asking only for surrender. But when at last all of life is polled and made plural, when it’s all been added up and averaged and answered and agreed upon, what happens if you don’t feel so plural? In the face of so much decidedness I conceal my doubts in shame, or something of that character, feeling isolated and singular, useless and a little vulnerable, with all my innermost, urgent thoughts condemned to soliloquy. Cutting away what I consider the engine of the essay — doubt and the unknown, let’s say — leaves us with articles and theses, facts and information, our side and their side, dreary optimism and even drearier pessimism, but nowhere to turn in a moment of true need. In that sense, I don’t see any other option but to head west with Augustine; it seems not only possible but desirable that not-knowing would be the first condition of prayer. What I’ve collected here, of course, are just a bunch of scrappy incondite essays, not prayers, but behind each piece, animating every attempt, is the echo of a precarious faith, that we are more intimately bound to one another by our kindred doubts than our brave conclusions.

A small press published some of these pieces in a tiny volume called Orphans . This isn’t the place to recount the saga of that ill-starred edition, but I’m happy to report that all thirty-five hundred copies of that feisty little foundling managed to find their vagrant way into the hands of readers, a solace to me like the thought of home. It was a small, small edition, easy to slip into a purse or pocket, and bears the distinction, I believe, of being sat on more than your average book. I’ve seen some really beat copies floating around, which serves me right. Thanks to Tin House, the substance of that book now lives on in this collection, reunited with some of its estranged siblings and joined by new work, including this gassy preface. Often the original titles were editorial decisions, hardly more than labels, and this time out, in Loitering , I’ve taken the liberty of rechristening the pieces, giving them the names they’ll answer to for the rest of their lives. I’ve also attempted to structure the material, gathering certain unruly obsessions into familial groups, a task whose futility is somewhat akin to controlling a mudslide. The title of the book fits my sense of things nicely. Writing an essay is a form of loitering — a lingering, a skulking, a meandering — and I like the sinister undertone— loitering with intent —but in the end it brings me back full circle to that boy at the bus stop, reading in the dim light, and to all my brothers and sisters, whether by blood or by bond, who find themselves, now and then, without apparent purpose.