Quote

I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing - a kind of night vision.

Ben Lerner

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Ben Lerner
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: February 4
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Remember
Vision
Mashed
Body
Eyes
Firefly
Kind
Games
Recurring
Faces
Glowing
Eye
Bodies
Black
Instead
Night
Playing
Dream
Game
Fireflies

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The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
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I don't think I'm going to publish this as fiction but I think I'm going to tell this story to a friend and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened.
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Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.
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I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds of moments in our daily lives that break - or at least could break - from the logic of profit and the modes of domination it entails. Zones of freedom, even if it's never pure.
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I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.
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I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
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Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.
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Experiments with the as if of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.
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I usually see the word metafiction applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.
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Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
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Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of realism of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.
Ben Lerner
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I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.
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What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.
Ben Lerner
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I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.
Ben Lerner
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I don't think it's always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn't imply people aren't multi-dimensional.
Ben Lerner
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I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.
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I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it's an antidote to despair.
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I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.
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My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.
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Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
Ben Lerner