Review (Encounter): Someone Told Me by Jay Ponteri

I thought of trying to write a traditional book review of Jay Ponteri’s stunning new book from Widow + Orphan Press, Someone Told Me, but first off it feels antithetical to write a traditional book review about a book as unfettered by conventions as this one, and secondly I couldn’t write a traditional book review if I tried—okay, okay, that’s a bit of a lie, I probably could write a perfectly respectable traditional book review if I made that my objective, if I staked my ambition upon that asinine goalpost, if I said Darla, you are not getting out of bed today until you’ve written a proper book review that might be featured at any number of reputable albeit rather boring literary outlets, but why would I want to, why would I want to force myself into a shape that isn’t mine? Besides, I’m not interested in boiling down Jay’s beautiful, unwieldly, internal, vulnerable, capacious book into a straight summation of themes: in part because I already perform such work for a living, and I’m trying to keep other parts of me alive in the meantime, an endeavor which is proving to be substantially more difficult than I ever imagined in my years dreaming toward and then attending school, in the years when I thought “an artful life” was just something you could go out and make for yourself no matter who you were or what your resources (or lack thereof), and in part because to reduce this book to something you can hold in the palm of your hand would be an offense, a violence actually, against the body of the book, which does not wish to be confined, which is exactly what it is and nothing else. The book’s cover, after all, is a blue jay—a cover which corresponds with a recurring image throughout the book—a self-loving reference to Jay’s own name—and birds are, in essence, elusive. The joy of seeing a blue jay in particular is that bright flash in the trees, that too-loud scuffle and squall which is gone before you have the chance to appreciate exactly what it meant to encounter such a brazen being in the first place. 

I loved encountering the speaker of these prose pieces, a speaker who is in many ways indistinguishable from my friend and mentor, the flesh-and-blood person, father, professor, bookstore and coffee shop frequenter, Jay Ponteri—though the mystery of language being what it is means that “every clause and cluster of language reveals (comes short of revealing)” and “reduces and expands” the person doing the writing. Even so, I can feel Jay’s particular way of thinking and feeling in every passage of this book; I am never not aware that I am inside someone else’s head, heart, looking out at the Skyways of Minneapolis or inward with the softening, compassionate gaze of someone who is trying to love themselves. “Knows no matter what he is not invisible if in fact he sees himself, accepts himself, tries to love himself. Loves himself by trying to love himself.” (What freedom! To love oneself by trying to love oneself! To not make self-love into another impossible aim, another assignment one can fail to do correctly, or in fear of failing, fail to do at all.) And because it is a rare thing indeed to be invited, truly and wholly invited, into someone else’s head and heart, I try to be a good house guest. I take off my shoes. I hang up my coat. I listen to the creak of the floorboards beneath my feet. Every sound offers the knowledge of itself. How lucky I am to hear it. How lucky I am to be here, in the warm and tender pages of this book, listening to words which in turn listen to themselves, a bevy of echoes all leading deeper into the self—“when I’m with you I’m nothing but heart,” Jay writes.

In Jay’s house, in the house of his writing which is perhaps also the house of his heart, I am surrounded by the specificity of the everyday which gently expands into the profound, the mesmerizing, the staggering, the eternal. These shifts are sudden, but never jarring: “Our sponges need replaced and what has hitherto been steady abruptly falls apart. Language doesn’t simply express feeling—language feels.” In this house, every moment attended to with humility and humor opens into the most valuable of offerings—another beating heart. Like this beautifully expansive passage about the death of his pug dog, Mr. G:

We called him the Manbaby. Mayonnaise, Cesc Fabregas. Mr. G ate poop. He held a PhD in Fecalogy, received Fecalships from the Fecalheim and the National Endowment for the Farts. Mr. G
ate poop all the way into the last week. When our pugs peed and pooped we had to be right out there with a bag to pick up the poop before Mr. G could get to it. Even when we thought
the yard was clean Mr. G would find a turd hidden in the shady part of the yard where the grass grew fast and thick. Mr. G wanted what he wanted. His joy, his affection for us and his capacity
to stir our own affections resulted from our giving him what he needed. Touch. Food. Exercise. A safe, dry place to sleep. A place to walk and explore a variety of scents and sights and
sounds. Anything you want to do I can do with you, his gaze seemed to say, I want to be connected to you, it said, If we connect to each other, you will feel visible, you will feel my love for you, it
said, I can lick your face for a long time if you rub my chest for a long time, it said, You throw I catch, it said, I want to live, I want to give, it said, And I’m getting old. The times I could have
scratched Mr. G behind the ears or Given Him Chest but I was too busy, I walked by his bed—the bed our other pug now lies on—meeting Mr. G’s eyes that said something else, like, I know
you’re not going to pet me right now but I’ll be here when you decide to pet me, that said, I forgive you for not loving me, that said, You can but you don’t, and no memory is more difficult than
the memory of his jaw dropping, his eyes clouding over and his body releasing, later lifting his limp body into my arms and carrying him across the front yard—in which he had laid that very
morning, bathing in the August sunshine—to our driveway where the veterinarian’s jeep was parked. I wanted to be the last person in our family to carry Mr. G. I wanted to be the one in our
family to carry the weight of feeling his fully spent body, wanted Mr. G to feel loved and cared for—to feel me carrying him—beyond his life into death, as if I were Charon, as if I were
carrying Mr. G’s soul to the underworld. One way the living spend time with the dead is to carry their bodies to their final resting places. The dead don’t rest or sleep. According to Rilke the
dead stand behind our chairs at the dinner table, awaiting an empty seat. I don’t want to stop thinking about Mr. G and I want to stop thinking about Mr. G. I hope I never forget what it felt
like to carry his dead body. I want to carry that pain into all of my days. I want Mr. G to know his suffering is worth something, his dying is worth something, but what? His life? His dying was
worth his life? An emotionally and physically varied, finite animal experience? A life in which we try to construct and create and love more than we destroy, exclude, or push others away? A
life of safe and loving touch, of daily chest rubs? A life of presence, of understanding we are in a moment and that moment switches to the next to the next and these moments eventually,
inevitably, sorrowfully end, always and never abruptly? 

If you’re crying right now, after reading this passage, crying into your dog’s fur, perhaps, stroking soft ears and crying into soft or course hair, comforting your dog who doesn’t know what’s wrong but stays still for you to hold anyway, comforting your dog and yourself by extension, just know I’m crying too, after copying this passage onto the page, as I cried after reading it for the first time and sought out my still living dog and held him and told him how much I love him and again for the second time I read the passage and cried, as I’m sure I will cry after subsequent readings many times to come. We are together in this grief, this grief of living knowing we must die, in living knowing we must watch our loved ones die, in living knowing each moment that expires takes with it the opportunity to connect to something or someone else that is momentarily alive, an opportunity we will miss when it is no longer with us, an opportunity we cannot always hope to seize, as life, as painfully finite as it is, feels impossibly long at times, and as such is impossible to be entirely present for every step of the way. And all the same we are together in our desire to do “something for somebody not because you want something from them in return but because you know someday you shall disappear and right now, this very moment, listen to the aspen leaves shimmy and percuss (tiny clacking shells) in the spring breeze, similar to the sound of ocean waves laving the shore and if I’m not being kind to myself then what is kindness towards others? Some kind of self-escape or denial?” I feel beautifully Jay’s attempts to show that in love, in compassion, in generosity, in kindness, we cannot exclude ourselves. Our hearts must expand to include our own hurts, our own bodies, the parts of ourselves we wish to hide or smother. In loving others, we learn to love ourselves. In trying to love ourselves, we learn compassion for others. In knowing others suffer in ways that are similar but different to ways that we ourselves suffer, we discover our capacity for holding said difference, and also each other. About empathy, Jay writes,

The white imagination does not share feelings with black and brown bodies, indigenous bodies because the white imagination fails to engage in mutualistic, interdependent framework,
because the white imagination holds at its center the fantasy of the heroic(tragic) individual in which the individual sets apart their needs from the needs of the human community, 
because the white imagination consists of the denial and self-delusion that whiteness has not in fact caused terrible harm to black and brown bodies and indigenous bodies within their 
lived experiences, which are vast, specific, alive, in formation.

As in—how can I feel what you are feeling when I refuse to feel even what I am feeling?”

I think what most struck me in Jay’s house, in the house of Jay’s book, is the compassion I felt for myself while reading his words, the self-forgiveness I had access to while forgiving him, while witnessing and feeling him forgiving himself. While confronting the role he has played in Portland’s gentrification; while engaging with his own learned white supremacist thoughts; while exploring the implications of his own non-white ancestry; while participating in the disintegration of his marriage (and the formulation of a new family dynamic that is rooted in love and respect); while cataloguing an exhaustive list of memories, observations, preferences, self-revelations; while addressing his soon-to-be-grown only son; while juxtaposing the male gaze which fractures and dismembers with a softer, more delicate gaze, a gaze which seeks to support or engender wholeness, a curious gaze, a gaze which only wishes to know that which wishes to be known; while imagining into the fissures of his family history, when one Ponteri brother was permanently separated from the other; while trying to love and hold his infant self who was kept in an incubator for the first few months of his life after being born prematurely, who was denied touch for the first few months of his life out of love, in order to keep him safe, in order to save his life. During this and this and this and this, I felt not only Jay’s attempts at bringing himself into the fold of his own expanding love, but also my own attempts to be loved, to love myself. And in so feeling discovered what some part of me knew already: an endless capacity for such. 

My favorite section of the book is a very small one I’ve heard Jay read several times in person at various events. It is the piece I think of when I think of his work, and it is the piece I most associate with who he is as a person. It begins “I want to read what you’re writing” and ends with this syntactically sinuous sentence (a sentence so characteristic of Jay’s writing that I’ve come to almost generally equate syntactic curvature with generosity):

I need to read your writing and what you’re reading and what you’re writing as you writing as you write your stuff because I can’t see inside your thoughts or anybody’s else’s and I can’t feel
your feelings and that makes me feel so lonely in mine and I don’t want to feel lonely, I want to read your words even in my dreams, let me fall asleep tonight and dream not of you but of
your words and the words you have and haven’t read or written, the words existing and yet to exist, the words hovering between us and around us and through us.

Perhaps this is my favorite section of the book because I’ve heard Jay reading it out loud in his own voice, his real world voice, the same voice he uses to order coffee and facilitate discussions on contemporary literature, literature in translation, the same voice he uses when he pronounces the word “pleasure” and his nose flares, something I assume everyone who knows him finds endearing, and because I could hear Jay’s love for reading and writing emanating from every word as he read it, because while he was reading it I sensed my own loneliness abating, however briefly, as a part of me became externalized by another’s words, as a part of me became known by myself through another’s exploration of themselves. I could speak forever to the generosity of Jay’s self-explorations. And in so doing, perhaps I’d learn to trust in the value of my own. 

There are so many aspects of this book I cannot address in this un-glossed torrent of admiration, this roughly written expression of thanks; there are so many other passages I’d like to mention, but I will end with this one last sentence which reminded me of an ineffably significant time in my life, a time when I got to share with Jay regularly our love of literature in the form of his being my abundantly generous teacher and mentor and me being his theatrically eager, perhaps even insensitively insatiable student (I cringe now when I think of what I took for granted, though I didn’t believe myself to be taking it for granted at the time), a time when, despite feeling nowhere else safe or held in my life, I felt safe and held in the space of time I sat inside his classroom, in the comments he would scribble in his particular, non-hierarchical mix of lower and uppercase letters on my stories, poems, meditations, self-revelations, fragments, annotations, essays, and so on, in his office when I would enter knowing there was no part of myself that was not welcome, no part of my need for connection and validation and a shared experience of love for the medium of language that would be deemed grotesque or burdensome, no part of my writing that couldn’t be gently and thoughtfully expanded, thereby expanding myself. When I read this passage, I feel love for my friend Jay and love for myself and love for the web of pain and difficulty and compassion that connects us all, though sometimes it is hard to see it, diaphanous as it is:

We feel intensely the pain of our wound to the extent we feel we are that wound and even though we don’t want to hurt the ones we love by asking them to touch our wounds and hold us as
we hurt, that is exactly what we want and need for the one we love to touch our wounds, to hold us touching our own wounds.