Charles

Roosters, rabbits, foxes, dogs, wolves, camels, donkeys, mules, horses, elephants. All, I believe, have sat under a human body as they trod through your works. Why the persistence of this image, people riding on animals?

Jesse

I wonder—because I did call the omnibus The Village On Horseback—if perhaps you are right. I have done almost no animal-riding myself. I suppose that part of the human-myth is the ease with which we manage landscapes and distances, so riding is a fundamental part of human metaphor. I guess I can’t resist partaking in it too. I have a roman game piece that I love. I acquired it in France. It has a man riding a rooster carved into one side. He is some kind of knight, albeit a ridiculous one. I think of that as my sigil.

Charles

I was thinking of that rooster. Presumably it does not struggle with the burden.

Jesse

No—foolishness makes the rider light.

Charles

It’s the same in the so-called “dystopian” situations in your books—they are not always so heavy-handed as the jacket copy makes them seem. The rules of the society might seem cruel or burdensome. But the enforcers are usually somewhat idiotic.

Jesse

One could wish people would speak a bit less about dystopia. In my books, the stewards of whatever menace exists, they are indeed rather silly. But silliness doesn’t preclude brutality. Quite the opposite. I think “dystopia” generally indicates vague doom-wallowing. But each of the books in question tends to have some specific matter in hand. That’s another reason I don’t like it. I think the worst things that happen in our lives often appear in trivial clothing.

Charles

Sometimes these stewards of menace have sort of good ideas. They often appear in the guise of teachers. You have the father in the second part of The Repeat Room, who, by means of sadistic theater games, tries to condition his children out of having personalities; this he does in protest of hypermodernity’s cult of the self.

Jesse

It is important in a text for the rationality to be distributed amongst the combatants. Given time, context and patience shift the terms of argument to make nearly any robust idiocy cogent.

Charles

When you are writing with some specific matter in hand, do you usually have a dog in the fight, so to speak? Does your dog change as you write?

Jesse

I let the voices convince me, and pull me one way or another. In some books, my sympathy is too large to admit a second love. But in others, I think everyone has a bit of my sympathy. This is definitely true in Silence Once Begun, a book where, to some degree, no one at all is in the right. Much better to err on everyone being wrong than on someone or anyone being right. In The Lesson, the chess-master is both a complete insane woman who mistreats a child, and also a person professing the deepest and most genuine love. It is good to let the text go in and out like the tide, and alternately convince you of different things.

Charles

I think of The Lesson, which you wrote in 2010, as bidding farewell to a more ornamented era in your work, books that played around with form and story.

Jesse

That seems to me to be correct. The early work is about story, especially story. The later work less so. Silence Once Begun, written in 2011, is the first book after that shift.

Charles

What occasioned the shift?

Jesse

Well, I had certainly done a lot of work in that vein. Perhaps a change was due. But the main reason was the end of my first marriage. I tried to come to terms with the new life such as I perceived it. I decided to be more plain going forward. Plainness seemed more appropriate, and to some degree it still does.

Charles

After having a breakthrough like that—do you ever regret the way you wrote before?

Jesse

No—I am not regretful. Maybe it is some kind of Buddhist thing. I don’t see myself now as exactly being the earlier versions of myself, not exactly, and so I can be fond of what they did without feeling it reflects on me too much. I think there are things that I could do better when I was younger. Some of the transcendent flashes are things I don’t know that I would manage now. I relied more heavily on gestural guess work—and incantatory flight, writing beyond what I knew.

Charles

I would guess the regret-lessness comes earlier than the Buddhism. You always wrote books very quickly, and in one draft, even before you were Buddhist.

Jesse

Maybe it is a strange mix: when I was young I was both greatly ambitious and also content to move from thing to thing. It seems to me that being meticulous in making things is very important; that was the study of much of my time. But when it comes to the making, one should admit the confusion and all its circumstances, otherwise how can a work exceed you? Most trained people can write quickly, but in doing so they often write poorly. The question is really how to write both quickly and carefully, with one ear to the ground. I think that this has to do with two things: having a great and broad acquaintance with the library or lexicon of candidate clauses and phrases that can bridge off of the stem that one has begun. Then you’re availed of much, even in the midst of a gallop of typing. And the second is a self-fueling concentration that forgets tiredness, etcetera. I think most people do have this, but usually only for particular provinces within their lives. Maybe it is rare to have it for writing; writing tends to exhaust people.

Charles

Yes but the words in those clauses, and which clauses to choose...I don’t think I could begin to write without the assurance I can delete or change what I have written.

Jesse

I think there is a philosophical stance, once common in poetry: admit the bayonet. Writing poems is such a ridiculous thing to do. If you are to do it well, you first admit the bayonet, and then you may begin. That is, allow the blade into your abdomen, etcetera. So once the blade is there, the shame is dispensed with, and the work of verse can start. By starting from a place of ridicule, more is possible.

Charles

The condition for me is I can ridicule myself after—by deleting stuff.

Jesse

It is the right thing to do to delete something that is plainly wrong and that torpedoes the book.

Charles

It’s good to hear you say that.

Jesse

When I am rereading the text on day 2, 3, 4, etcetera, I am free to adjust things as I go, typos, missed words, etcetera, but also to fix anything that doesn’t seem right. So there is a circular wind that blows through it. The main point is just that one shouldn’t try to repair the text into something it isn’t. Or—that isn’t my approach. I believe other people have success with it.

Charles

When did Buddhism become a part of your life? It seems to me that around the same time you settled on plainness in writing, you began to settle on plainness in life as well. You began to wear only one outfit, quit eating meat, deleted your website. Did it all come at once?

Jesse

I always liked sitting, and loved the Buddhist stories, the Gateless Gate, Transmission of the Lamp, etcetera, but I am a very distractible person. Or, I should say, alternately distracted and concentrated. I wanted to be able to sit for hours, but I simply could not when I was younger. So for me then drug-taking was a more important portal. But somehow in my early thirties I became more disciplined and patient, and suddenly I could do the sitting that was necessary—and it was a kind of delight. The year was probably 2012 or 2013 when I became more serious about it. You have in your own person and your circumstance a very strange and exemplary proposition—an ongoing experiment of extreme size and stupidity. It is a true pleasure in the life to try different things—even very catastrophic and committal things. Ultimately, there isn’t so much to lose, since continuing in the same course deadens one anyway.

Charles

What do you mean by extreme size?

Jesse

Just that your life radiates in all directions and encompasses everything. There isn’t anything larger than that. But similarly you are a very small part of what’s going on.

Charles

There’s a part in your Autoportrait where you speak of sadness as a sort of discipline. I’m wondering if this was always a discipline for you, if you were a melancholic child, or if it came into your life at a certain moment.

Jesse

I was lucky in my childhood, both for the things that were good, and for those that were painful. My family was quite poor, and often in difficult straits, partly because my brother’s care was complicated, but also because my parents didn’t make the most sensible decisions. They were dreamers—both hippies, although not in any kind of puerile sense. My father was arrested for protesting Vietnam on the steps of the Capitol building. So in any case, we were evicted from one apartment because of the noise I made, and then we moved to a place next to the train tracks and near a factory. Later this would be deemed a superfund site; it was a Grumman factory. The town that I lived in was fairly well-to-do, and so I suffered in school because I wore the wrong clothing, and was on the wrong tempo, I suppose. This was the nineteen eighties, and materialism was really in vogue. But my father was a Prince Peter Kropotkin anarchist (so he said), and had a beard. We listened to a lot of folk music in the house, British folk music, Irish folk music. But I suppose every child must be melancholy; I found it necessary at least. People didn’t like seeing my brother or having to deal with him, although he was gentle and sweet. So I felt I was always set against the people in the town. I was in special education for a time, and often disciplined: detention, suspension, etcetera. I was an atheist and also didn’t believe I was American. My family had come to North America prior to the Revolution; I felt this meant I had a choice whether I was American or not, and that I believed I shouldn’t have to be.

Charles

Has your family influenced the way you write?

Jesse

My mother has an interesting way of making things. She is dogged and quite humble in her approach, but she continues to meddle and meddle, and fight with the material, be it cloth (sewing), reeds (basketweaving), paper (book-making), etcetera, until it yields into something like what she wants. She moves towards the vicinity of her hope and the task of that procedure is evident in the final product. I think that my work is much like my mother’s in so much as I don’t try to hide the hand of the writer. Of course I want the text to be sharp and elegant, and I believe that the books succeed in that. But I also want them to be sudden and to show the labor of that suddenness. My father wanted to be a historian, and our childhood apartment on 111 Sheep Pasture Rd in Port Jefferson was full of war books, especially Napoleonic history. But he liked history of all periods, and also literature, especially Irish literature, and poetry. So there were always books around. He was an anarchist, but a pacific and gentle one. His anarchism was simply not believing in, or giving in to the systems that govern our lives, and always trying to perpetuate other methods of exchange, and to see them when and where they existed, and grace them. I believe in that kind of anarchism (which has nothing to do with gas masks or Molotov cocktails). One can always refuse, and turn away, and refuse, and participate in a way of one’s own choosing. Even when forced to give lip-service to the day-to-day powers that be. He died in the year of life that I am in now (48). I thought then that he was rather old.

Charles

Do you feel rather old?

Jesse

What do you think I will say?

Charles

I would think not.

Jesse

No—I feel rather childish, sometimes bright and sometimes dull, as in long afternoons, but never old.

Charles

And what about your brother?

Jesse

Census tells the tale of my brother’s influence better than I can say now.

Charles

Was there another shift after you wrote Census? I’m thinking of Repeat Room, Divers’ Game, Children VI. These books feel less personal, more bleak.

Jesse

Yes, I think so. Those books also express many of my reservations about identity as such.

Charles

Interesting that you’d then go and write your Autoportrait right after them.

Jesse

I had decided when I first read Edouard Levé’s Autoportrait to do my own at the same age. So there was a clock being observed. Also Levé had figured out a way to both substantiate and nullify identity. Just facts and statements, no story.

Charles

But Levé was a photographer—I’m afraid you are too much of a novelist. Your Autoportrait is full of narrative tricks—plants and payoffs, reveals. There is even a sort of dramatic arc to it.

Jesse

Ah you think so? Levé’s photography is also a kind of story—a supposed refusal of one. I think the form of the autopotrait has great potential. But the stitching together of the bits is not necessarily so easy. The danger of the form is of implying too much with adjacency. One thing I didn’t like about the original is that it does attempt to perpetrate the image of a person ruthless with himself. I wanted to allow more contradictions in mine—though who knows if it succeeded.

Charles

I can’t picture a self-portrait that does not portray an image. Even the image of a person who allows for contradictions is an image.

Jesse

Probably poets will be better in the long run at autoportrait than novelists. Poets have to understand adjacency when constructing volumes.

Charles

One of your unpublished books, Comedy of the Bones of Your Face, will be published soon in Argentina. You told me once that you thought this would be your last book.

Jesse

That’s true. I was very satisfied with it, and also very dubious about the proposition of continuing to work. American publishing is not an easy atmosphere. Perhaps my fears were realized when I found that no one wanted to publish it. But in Argentina they care more for what we used to call literature.

Charles

I will say it feels like a book that wants nothing to do with humanity. It is not very funny. It is bleak, but it is firm in its bleakness. It does not cry out.

Jesse

Yes, it is an anti-human book, that’s one way to put it. Another way would be to say it is a book that’s on behalf of everything that isn’t human.

Charles

How do you write on behalf of things that aren’t human? What do you think of the novelist who writes books from the perspective of animals?

Jesse

here is a great difference between writing from the perspective of an animal while deeply cognizant of our complete incapacity to understand animals, and writing from the perspective of an animal while believing one is doing a rather good job of it. There is also writing from the perspective of an animal with no intention of including any animal-ness whatsoever, where the animal posture is simply a tool for dissecting some human matter. There is an uncrossable gap between the human mind and the minds and rationales of the world’s other beings. But it remains true that to attempt to think about what non-human modes might be is rewarding, if fruitless. If humanity had to be compared to something it is far more like a car-bomb than it is like a tree. But human exceptionalism interpenetrates nearly all of our thinking and all of our cultural objects. Thus an avowed posture of anti-humanism is a small step towards remediating the greatest single bias we possess.

Charles

So your thinking of ceasing to write novels— it wasn’t that you had decided against novels, from a moral standpoint.

Jesse

No—but I have written so many books, I sometimes wonder whether it is enough. “Jesse, you have had your say, it’s time to let others speak.”

Charles

In the most recent novel you’ve written, Time Has a Silver Hull—I have the sense that by the time you wrote this, you made a sort of peace with mankind.

Jesse

What insinuations! A peace with mankind...

Charles

Well, Time Has a Silver Hull is not quite a novel—this book takes its form from the Icelandic saga. But it is all about people, the brutal silly things that people do every day. There are hundreds of characters. It is a delightful book. The thought that occurred to me was this: one of the many ridiculous statements that Dostoevsky put into his characters’ mouths was that thing about “the more I love man in general, the more I loathe man in particular.” With you, and especially in this book, I get the sense it’s the other way around. Man in general is just a thing—neutral or even bad, or, as you said, like a car bomb. But if there is any redemption in us, it is in particularly wonderful individuals, and in the stories our lives provide.

Jesse

That’s quite a formulation. I think it is really correct. I do tend to loathe man in general, but then to find things I like about nearly everyone.

Charles

I think especially of one character in the book, a beggar named Skordi. There is almost nothing you could say in favor of him. He steals, he shouts insults at people, he is lazy, mean, contributes nothing. But there is something wonderful about him. I suspect he is very dear to you.

Jesse

Yes, Skordi. It was very sad what happened to him. I really like the filthy gentleman who comes asking for payment repeatedly. But he is a real shitheel.

Charles

There are lots of shitheels. It’s interesting how we can tell the delightful shitheels from the despicable ones.

Jesse

Yes. Do you think the interview is complete?

Charles

I have a few more questions. Simple questions. How does one prepare to write a saga?

Jesse

It’s good to read as many sagas as one can. And it is good to like them. It is important to understand what data can be entered into the record and what can’t. With saga it is a kind of historical consciousness. One can put into the saga only things that someone would repeat to someone else. It is at the level of population. It is like a murder investigation. Everyone who has anything to do with something is caught up in the net. Everyone must have their due.

Charles

You’ve given full vent to violence in this book. The daily business of bloodshed. It reminds me of your early story about the duels.

Jesse

Yes, both are incidental texts—books motivated by and constructed from the haphazard.

Charles

Then there are all the lawsuits and legal proceedings. Is that how it is in the old sagas, too?

Jesse

In some of them. But the book is also a haibun in a way: poetry is part of its nature, probably 50%, although not by volume. Like Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Charles

I read this book on an island in the Gulf of Finland and afterward found myself trying to imitate the type of poetry in it, with little success.

Jesse

Look at the poems next year and you may like them.

Charles

I saw a monumental portrait of a noblewoman at the Frick a month ago. Originally the woman had been painted in shepherd’s garb, with a shepherd’s hat and crook, and with sheep around her. This was when pastoral portraiture was in vogue. A few decades later, the artist painted over the pastoral stuff, presumably when it went out of fashion. What, in ten years, will today’s writers want to paint over in their works?

Jesse

Ha—a decade must be too short. Let’s say in a hundred years—but by then people all previous tales will have been translated into the simplified English that we will be using, a language with only a hundred or so words.