The Body Itself – A review of One Person Holds So Much Silence by David Greenspan
I am sitting at my desk. There is a buzzing sensation occurring within my left big toe, right underneath the toenail. It has been occurring for the last five days. Perhaps longer. If I had to make an estimate, the buzzing––which is not painful but rather just feels like the faintest ongoing electric current––occupies somewhere between 1% and 3% of my mind depending on what is going on and what I am doing. I do not know why this buzzing is happening and am too embarrassed to ask others about it. I hope it will end soon.
Other things occurring: a cat in the living room that meowed a moment ago, most likely out of boredom or longing for its owner, my roommate. He looks like another cat I shared a home with a few years ago as I watched a friend slip into a depression. There is a sink that has a mess of materials covering the strainer. The mass of wet things––coffee grounds, bits of chopped onion, watermelon juice, globs of greek yogurt, cat food, and much, much more I could never know––has a flesh color to it. Like a pile of pink and shredded skin. When I look at it I think of the time I gashed open my knee on the side of an old refrigerator playing hide and seek in a friend’s basement; how a flap of skin spread like a gill and leaked and leaked until my leg was covered red and the game was very much over. Gill, blood, childhood: I am fishing off the coast of Wrightsville Beach, pulling Spanish Mackerel into a boat that is rocking and uncomfortable and stark white. Later my father teaches me how to filet and clean the fish with a curved and thin knife, tossing head and guts into a nearby bucket. Bucket, guts, depression, cat: my friend’s shirt has been cut open and there are needles in his arm and an airmask on his face. There are paramedics in his bedroom asking many questions. The cat has run out the front door and is somewhere in the night-covered neighborhood.
The mind is bound by the walls of sense, memory, and imagination: that which it is experiencing currently, that which it has experienced, and that which it can reasonably or unreasonably hypothesize about experiencing. The mixture of these elements add up to what we call perception. What it is like to walk about or lay down for sleep or exist somewhere in between. How it is to drink a glass of wine with a date you wish to impress and have the smell of sulfur drag you back to your morning’s shit, and how there was blood when you wiped, and how your grandfather died of prostate cancer a few years ago and it was most likely that you had just rubbed your anus too hard and too much, but you cannot shake the worry and No, so actually I was born in Albuquerque but moved to Los Angeles when I was very young.
Identity is created out of perception. Out of the continual state of experiencing we recognize patterns in ourselves and begin to construct a vision of ourselves as someone who experiences life in a particular way. Someone who’s state of perception has a number of consistent traits and quirks to it. Faulty and abstract and created from the raw sense data of uncaring, objective phenomena, the elusiveness of memories, and the imaginary-ness of dreams, identity remains the most important thing we have. It is how we both arrive at and fight off despair. It is, very obviously, us.
Thus it is often when this state of being is expressed to us, examined or abstracted through art, our initial reaction can often be one of revilement, of rage, or embarrassment. Perhaps this is how one might feel when reading the first few poems of David Greenspan’s One Person Holds So Much Silence, in which we are confronted with cuts of flesh being likened butterfat, plucked out eyebrows, requests for someone to “spit in & around my mouth”, and a mouth as “empty as Wyoming.” One might feel that the self, and one’s comfort with the self is under a deconstructivist attack by an angry and vulgar poet who very much doesn’t like punctuation.
And this reaction is fair to some degree: it is not fun to recognize that the most dignified thing––what we are––is truly just a collection of very undignified things. But out of this initial reaction we will, hopefully, ask ourselves, how did this collection of words, this object created by a stranger in some very far away place make me feel that? And then we begin to understand it as crucial in showing us the actual slime and goo with which we are made and how this basicness of construction being afforded the highest of dignity through the faulty process of identification permeates up and up and up until you see that whole worlds, cultures, and histories are based off the same strange leap from perception and this is both the most alienating and most comforting thing that you can really have someone show you. And then you grow very thankful for this object for showing you this and very much wish to share it with others. David Greenspan’s One Person Holds So Much Silence is such an object.
Published last March by Driftwood Press, David Greenspan’s debut poetry collection seeks to find reason between the body and the world it occupies. It searches through the mess of sensory data, bodily functions, road signs, pill bottles, old dreams, old lovers, fragmented memories, and attempts to piece together a cohesion of the self. Kaleidoscopic in approach, images and ideas seem to ring out as they do in real life: familiar enough to warrant your attention, but mysterious enough to captivate awe and activate a spiritual yearning you might only be comfortable articulating around your closest friend or psychiatrist:
We are a collective of loosely associated ventures. An arrangement / of worships. We are a brand but only in the sensing of emotion. / You might say we are a rhizome of commodity forms, though / we discourage you from expressing in this manner
– “Two: The Years, Sometimes Many and Sometimes Few, Between”
Seeking worldly connection, Greenspan extends this deconstructivist gaze to the objects around him as well. One of the more striking poems from the collection appears almost exactly in the middle through “An incomplete history of”, in which we are treated to a linear splattering of images and ideas and people associated with the “history” of airports. Perhaps with the absurdity of the way in which we construct identity in mind––the way our self-concept is not much more than an amalgamation of vivid moments and interactions––Greenspan illustrates how the history of human progress is created in the same fashion. Written with no capitalization or punctuation and substituting ampersands for all conjunctions, Greenspan renders the fluidity of inner cognition and applies it to a place full of people roaming around, caught within their dancing minds. No one, for the most part, thinks of the history of liminal places: they are simply, by their very nature, locations that serve only to get you to the more meaningful parts of life. But in Greenspan’s eyes and through his writing these places are shown to be the collective unconscious spiritual centers which they truly are: ones in which the impossible was once pondered, accomplished, and then completely forgotten about until all that was left were the neon lights designating ampersand-ed corporate entities and the ghost of something spiritually vital no one can ever quite put a finger on.
People / talked ate slept left / on the nine forty-five nonstop / to Dulles with reasonably priced / tickets time passed / as it does onion smell / piled up standing in / line became a worship / remove shoes for moveable / altar bathrooms / stayed bathroom remember / the awful prick & pressure of cabin air as we pluck today’s long-sleeved marrow
– “An incomplete history of”
There is something Howl-like about the culminating third part of the book, which takes the form of a single, extended poem, “A Poem to Pass the Time.” Yet, unlike the rage that sits at the heart of Howl, in which Ginsberg illustrates the effects of American moral decay and institutional tyranny in weaving fashion, from coast to coast, city to city, mind to memory to myth, Greenspan presents us something slightly more hushed and personal, embodied by the rather anti-epic title.
And perhaps this is indicative of what a perspective such as Greenspan’s affords one in the contemporary era: now sixty-seven years after the original publishing of Howl, we, as a population, have experienced very little substantive changes to the things in which Ginsberg located as maddening so many years ago. Perhaps the only really noticeable change is the social acceptability of this tyranny and moral rot once at least viewed as strange. Thus Greenspan seeks a cure for the madness inward. Through a deconstruction of his own self and his markers of identity, which have been composed by the unconscious act of sensing the world around him; by taking in the world and his time which has become so saturated with normalized madness that with each breath we can never be so sure we did not just take in our ultimate demise.
if writing is dispossessed thinking / what is writing freed from thought / a perverse inventory the kindness of questions the poem isn’t very kind / my penmanship makes the whole world / nervous as a junkie on the third day of withdrawal
– “A Poem to Pass the Time”
There is seemingly a lot of David Greenspan on display in this book. There are specific images like yellow, nicotine-stained fingers, kidneys gorged with apple slices, rotten fly-covered apple slices, many, many different pills, and a few proper nouns, whose utterance and occasional recurrence give you a feeling of the ultra-intimate. But it is not the hyper-constructed intimate which we are so used to seeing in the literary arts today––it is not the cheeky meta-narration of one’s own life, nor is it the overly confessional and emotionally overwrought diary entry staining so much of contemporary writing. The self Greenspan presents to his readers is unguarded and unarticulated, allowing for judgment; a collection of strong feelings and memories with just enough of a stylistic collective fabric to hold together as a product of unified consciousness. Much like the cover image, and the images appearing at the section breaks, Greenspan peels off his skin, sits down in front of us, points at a bleeding limb, and asks, Does this make me, me?
One Person Holds So Much Silence is available for purchase at Driftwood Press’s site: https://www.driftwoodpress.com/product-page/one-person-holds-so-much-silence
Interview by Jake Hargrove