Sincerest Performance

A personal essay by Benjamin Gappmayer

LIFT me close to your face till I whisper,
What you are holding is in reality no book, nor part
of a book,
It is a man, flushed and full-blooded—it is I—So
long!    - Walt Whitman

Don’t worry. I’m not as ambitious as Whitman was. I don’t expect to be reborn on this page, to crawl out of this paper for some secret meeting with you. Even if I could, I don’t think you would want that, either. I certainly don’t. 

The thought is more frightening than anything else, really.  Whitman is read at arm’s length, a dozen states’-lengths, and a hundred some-odd years. At best, he’s an acquaintance thrice removed, through time and place and print. If he were to materialize before his readers, even the small talk would be terribly, terribly uncomfortable. Better to enjoy the echo over Pennsylvanian Appalachians, the sound of a distant uncle in all his rambling affection. In this there is no risk of real encounter, of exposure or indecency. There is no blood here, just dried ink. 

And yet, we remember what Whitman left us. He is loved for his excess, his bold and strange love. Nobody knows Whitman, but they know the written Whitman, the glimpse of him in meandering lines and the rhymeless mess, and I wonder what it took for him to shout that wealth of affection so loudly that his syllables are still rebounding, bouncing…

Is a shout like that ever authentic? Is this Whitman as-he-was or the Whitman hollering to be heard above the squabble and crowd he loved so much? Maybe he stretched and pulled his words until they were so large that he knew they would fill this country. An intimacy he broadcasted across a nation.

Little in writing –or speaking, for that matter—in this world is really a personal affair. 

Performance
Letters are written with recipients in mind, and journals are mostly kept in anticipation of some future reader, even if it is just the writer with a few years’ distance. Shakespeare wrote his love poems not just to some specific lover but a host of lovers, a consuming mob. As soon as affection is public, its performance. The wrinkles in paper skin are pulled taut, made illegible for beauty’s sake. The orator’s voice and innermost thoughts might harmonize, but they never quite match.

Heine – one poet that Whitman once admired – said it seemed to him that “too many lies are told in beautiful verse, and truth refuses to appear clothed in meter.” Maybe he was right; the truth is bent around the rhyme’s demand. This was never just about poetry though. 

Some would speak of this theatricality with disgust. As though they had never seen a parent play the clown for their child, as though they had never bitten their tongue for a friend’s sake or played the sturdy anchor for the storm-tossed mourner. These masks are more than cheap lies, more than the tricks we play to earn others’ affection. They’re tools. Not every honest expression was meant for every conversation.

Seeming Sincere
Not to say that every author, ever mask-maker, was a fraudster (and not to say they weren’t). Exaggeration is the tax of this great distance, a world held together more by telephone lines than by city walls demands a barbaric yawp. A heartbeat isn’t heard through rhyming lines, the heaving breaths invisible in prose. To say much of anything at all it must be shouted, bellows so loud they’re heard through rigid typeset and stale font. The poet’s work is to sing without the lilt of human voice, keeping time without a pulse. 

I read once that the art of caricature isn’t so much in misinterpreting the face. A truly skilled caricaturist is someone who understands what the most prominent features of a face are through human eyes. A millimeter more space between the eyes or the quarter inch difference in nose placement doesn’t sound like much, but we’ve been trained through millennia to pick up on the slightest of variations, to magnify them in our own mind until they make a distinct impression. A caricature artist knows how to represent these funhouse mirror faces, these faces that are both more and less authentic than a photograph.

So it is with most expression. The best art may be those that distill some great essence of soul or emotion (like sweat), that boil down, refine, bottle and sell this bit of self like perfume. It is the artist-from-concentrate, idiosyncrasies of thought and opinion blown up so big that you can’t miss them anymore.

Sometimes I’m not sure I’d want to stretch myself to fill these pages; it seems, to me, a touch unsanitary. But then, Whitman was a lover of dirt and sweat. Perhaps he saw the beauty in the oil-sheen spill of ink on paper. 

Homespun Hyperbole
No, this urge towards surplus isn’t just the writer’s transgression. The problem runs deeper than the egotists and grandstanders, but in the grandiosity of our entire tongue.  Ours is a literary language, the gluttony of wordsmiths and romantics grows like dandelions in our vernacular. No friends but best friends, no affection but love, never raining but always pouring. It’s all of the volume with none of the charm, empty calories sans nutrients. 

Our tongue is a borrowed thing. The words are rented words, on loan from King James’ Bible and Shakespeare’s old jokes. Their rhythm is a borrowed thing, the songs that spin my syntax are hand-me-downs. And yet, it hasn’t worn down. This fabric is a sturdy one, despite alterations. A billion seamstresses tinker with this language, taking in, hemming up, letting out, and yet the stitches never quite wear through.

Even my sound is not my own. It is the story of pioneers and foreigners in a west that was wild to them, made all the wilder in its dialect. The blend of my English vowels was born on the tongues of distant visitors, smoothed like river rocks into the burblings of home, the staccato of its consonants tilled and planted for my reaping. These are the sounds of love, not by their own virtue but for how much they’ve been spoken, gems polished in their passing, person to person to person. 

The words become a ritual enacted, existing more for their cadence than for their meaning. They are (perhaps) both less beautiful and yet brighter than the world they describe. Their steady drip (Hello again how are you what’s new with you what a beautiful day) carves the path we walk with friends and loved ones. Its their tempo that makes the meaning, the frequency of correspondence that drowns out the individual exchange (did you get enough to eat how was work how was your day).

Epilogue
And so this essay ends, not with a bow or with curtains’ close, but this; I will submit this and close out the tab. Then I will stand up from this little room in my apartment, maybe stretch, brush my teeth, and go to sleep. In a few days’ time maybe I’ll come back to this little script to tweak a word here or there, before wandering back to my kitchen to eat something – noodles with canned sauce, what have you. Perhaps by then I’ll see this and cringe a little; maybe that cringe makes me an authentic artist.


Image credit: "Red Human Face Monument on Green Grass Field" by Mike (Free to use image via Pexels)
"Assorted-Color Mask" by hitesh choudhary (Free to use image via Pexels)