Narrative was not just a story that flowed, was not just language flowing, but, at its most inventive or reflexive, was also a positioning or mapping of philosophies, a slowing down of that comprehension of one’s having had an experience.

I paused reading those lines. I was on my way reading Renee Gladman’s Calamities and I felt missing out; I only have limited access to her previous monograph, Prose Architecture and her Ravickian series. But her piece, “The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture,” is available online and I of course cannot help myself to not read Calamities side by side with her article. (At the end of the article, Gladman mentions about writing calamity–“a spiralling thinking essay”). So I wish to understand her process, of writing and drawing. Her endearing inquiry and thought art prepare me for the surprises of patience, of slowing down. Calamities is also a map, a guide, an entrance to a place. Also, an exit.

Each fragment of Calamities starts with “I began the day …” One time the day began with a lecture, a task of compiling a list; other times, it did begin with an utterance of words “I am not looning up on claw” before “feeling angry as a result of [her] disposition,” and a look up at the whiteboard, and a look into the “infinity of the revision of [her] novel in progress.” To begin the day without actually ending it; the key is to starting it again. Every day is a new exploration and also a thought revision in the making, moments of slipping through interstices. Her calamities are statements of passaging, “a sphere of folds.” And often times she just let her words to stop. The language does not always catch up. It rails. Back and forth.

I have a (bad?) habit of reading nonnarrative book (which includes poems): I fixate. As I wonder about words railing, and derailing, passing and pausing, Gladman’s note of backed up Amtrak train holds my attention:

 I began the day on an Amtrak train that was backing up. New England had flooded (once again) and become impassable: it had us pulling in then backing up then pulling forward then stopping and repeating these motions until, finally, we’d achieved the right alignment and passengers could disembark the train. This dusky place was New Haven and the platform was full of Connecticut commuters hurrying home in a light rain, in this month of May, which everyone expected to be hot in this part of the country, where what you had instead was a wet, perpetually cold feeling in the air. A voice came on. Apparently, the tracks had flooded. We needed to remain here. No, we needed to detrain and wait for buses in the station. No, the station was too crowded we should remain on the train. No, half in the station, half on the train. No, finally, it was decided: all on the train. My fellow passengers had grown tired and all tried to get into the café car at once. The voice came on again to say that the café car was closed. We were in a predicament. I hadn’t moved. I hadn’t become thirsty. There was some math to figure out: New England was becoming the Pacific Northwest. To be more specific, the Atlantic Northeast was becoming the Pacific Northwest, and quickly. First, I had to figure out what would happen to the Pacific Northwest once we had become it. It couldn’t be that both northern ends of the opposite coasts would have twin weather systems. There was no place in logic for that. So if we were to become the Pacific Northwest, then the Pacific Northwest would have to undergo its own transformation. Obviously, the Pacific Northwest would not become the former Atlantic Northeast, because we could have just stayed what we were, if that were possible. No, it would be something more along the lines of declension, something being less than it was before, which was why I was doing math and not paying much attention to the conductor’s voice, which was, if anything, loud and New England in nature. You had to understand the enormity of the problem. It would not be simply that the former Atlantic Northeast was now the Pacific Northwest, but that the environment—the people, how they called themselves, the structures they built—would have to change as well. You couldn’t be the new Pacific Northwest and behave as if you were the former Atlantic Northeast, which technically you still were in terms of geography (though, soon, your new climate would make your landscape unrecognizable). So, what would happen to the New England personality? That was what I was trying to figure. It was not so good right now. It was tight, shut in, like winter but all year round. So, I was trying to understand what happened to a bad personality when the conditions in which it lived became worse, and couldn’t help wondering why the former Atlantic Northeast wasn’t always the new Pacific Northwest with the way people behaved. I mean, they really did already act as if all there was was rain.

I stuck on that “Pacific Northwest” in repeat and the rolling of sentences that doesn’t look like sequences. It definitely avoids clarity of events. It only knows linings of location. And perhaps, more accurately, it stands on every edges of orientation. A sort of positioning. That paragraph calculates directions and actions that always changing at a glimpse of punctuation. Like a compass that guides us where the north is, thinking-language also leads even when its needle quivering. “Most people,” she wrote in the earlier page, “did not begin looking at points until they became lines.” Calamities is lines of tactile points–a book on structuring.

As a reader who does not acquire English as its mother tongue, Gladman’s artistic calamities make space. “I’d learned that to think in [English] you had to be patient: you had to say one part, like drawing one side of a cube, then say the next part, like drawing another side, and keep on saying and drawing until eventually you’d made a complex observation and a picture-feeling.” To be patient. Until eventually make a complex observation. And a picture-feeling. It’s a meditation on the act of thinking, visible through writing and drawing, that make possible for a place of dwelling to emerge. It makes me hold close the many moments when my tongue refuses to speak English and what I can do is to “uhm” and make silences, or slipping Indonesian phrases that search for words. It makes me revisiting the gap between desires of telling narrative and throwing it completely. The key is not always about closing that rift. But to actually reside in it. And here where Gladman’s core question on language and translation blossoms.

In her latest conversation with Kate Briggs, Gladman says, “Translation, like architecture, works as this wondrous analogue to the experience of writing, that strangeness of being a conscious presence moving inside and through language with this thing you’re holding, watching the thing change with very little control over the new shapes it takes, trying to evolve and shift with the changes.” The losing of what is visible. Language in translation cannot always (or never does) represent. Often times, they just slip through in between the grids; the only thing to embrace such passing is to walk away from things you have said or written down. No follow up. No coming back. You let them go. My linguistic anxiety eases down; the worry, whether my English is proper or not, no longer chokes my throat. As Gladman says, “I tried to move forward in my mouth.”