You will see you have an underlying tone and plot to your life underneath the one you've been told. Circular and image bound. Something near tragic, near unbearable, but contained by your irreducible imagination – who would have thought of it but you – your ability to metamorphose like organic material in contact with changing elements. The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.
With The Chronology of Water, author Lidia Yuknavitch has written a hard-punching and profane memoir, hinting at the kind of life most of us would recoil from, in language most of us would be too polite to employ, with an unapologetic refusal, in the end, to have learned from her mistakes. The writing suffers all of the MFA-style excesses that usually distance me from the new wave of American-university-trained writers – the meandering repetitions, the post-ironic self-awareness, the compound neologisms – and I can totally see why this book seems so polarising: the reader is going to respond strongly, love or hate. As for me: this is exactly the kind of writing that I usually have no patience for, but Yuknavitch totally reached me; her pain touched my latent pains; I reacted physically to this book and I reckon that is the point of art.
I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn’t know then how deeply my mother’s song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn’t know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn’t know we were our mother’s daughters after all.The Chronology of Water flows like mountain streams to the sea, exploring first one branch and then another, exposing how impossible it would be to separate the pooled water molecules back into the fonts that first sourced them; to mix my metaphors, we are the sum of everything that ever happened to us, but it's a myth of narrativisation that we can untangle our knotted skeins back into the tidy threads of our experiences. And so Yuknavitch begins her story with a transformative event from her adulthood and then splashes around here and there in her personal timeline, painting a broad picture without getting into details. We learn that growing up, her father was abusive, her mother a suicidal alcoholic who failed to protect her daughters, and that Yuknavitch was a nationally-ranked competitive swimmer. A college swimming scholarship allowed Yuknavitch to finally escape her profoundly unhappy home, but that freedom led to alcohol and drug abuse, as well as a deep dive into sexual experimentation. But as Yuknavitch herself insists, this is not an abuse memoir, nor is it a memoir of overcoming addiction: her life has not been lived to provide a redemption narrative for other people, but has simply been lived to form the wheel on which she spins her pain into art. Yuknavitch flunked out of college twice (but eventually earned a PhD and is currently a professor at Eastern Oregon University) and has had two failed marriages (but is currently married to the writer and filmmaker Andy Mingo, with whom she is raising their son), and despite having lived her early adulthood as someone with “the ability to drive into death head-on”, writing has brought meaning and understanding to Yuknavitch's life.
I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience – bring words close to the body – as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry.The sex, the drugs, the abuse, the swimming: It would seem that Yuknavitch has lived a more body-focused life than most, and as she notes a few times, she is inspired by writing that attempts to capture “the intensity of corporeal experience”. In this memoir, any time her memories involve her body (the sex, the drugs, the abuse, the swimming), the writing tends to go all stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear, William S. Burroughs typing-Naked Lunch-on-opium-in-an-Istanbul-flophouse. And again, while this type of overconstructed postmodern artsy-fartsiness tends to strain my patience, Yuknavitch pulls it off; I was transported despite myself. Images like those in the following passage speak directly to my personal tastes:
With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.The Chronology of Water reads like an art project – it doesn't follow the conventions of memoir or the typical three act play of American life (intro, struggle, redemption) – and as such, response will vary. For me, I was equally scandalised and deeply moved; Yuknavitch wields the tools of the modern MFA writer to bludgeon her way to the top of the heap.
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