Something Briefly Inhabited: On Patricia Lockwood

I was all done with breathing and air when suddenly I was on the scent again, finding it all over Patricia Lockwood’s writing. I had seen it with the baby in No One is Talking About This, and it became a crucial moment in my recent book, On Breathing. Her baby was the one that told me that breathing was speaking was writing. Infancy is the most open of doors with the widest eyes. The baby practiced breathing in utero, taking little sips of air, about to say anything, everything. Lockwood's intimation is that air is there when you need to regain yourself. Take her first mystical experience as a child following an anesthetic gone wrong after an injury. Unable to breathe, covered in hives, life took on a strange plentitude. Staring at an acorn, she felt she “had been present at the beginning of its time and its fulfilment. It was the span of my life. I saw the hole in the snow the acorn made, where I had not previously been.” The whole of one’s life isn’t some melancholic rumination on death but a feeling of fullness: an intimacy with breath and time.

Lockwood surprisingly writes about watching the X-Files: “As I watched, I would think sometimes of E.M. Forster: wind and water were always sweeping through his characters and leaving a freshness behind. Anderson seemed to be that freshness: something briefly inhabited, and the open door.” What a mystical couple, Forster and Anderson. In their freshness, both seem like ancients. The 90s already feels like another time, which makes me feel old. What I would give for an open door. But I’m amused that a younger generation of writers is hanging around my childhood. “The six inches between herself and Mulder, as she stood on her Scully box, turned somehow to breath, to pure intimacy. Her mouth always a little open. Yes, that was the word. First entered. Then fresh.” Air doesn’t mediate for Lockwood; it is pure medium. Feeling its freshness is knowing aliveness and Anderson is its feminine vessel. Refreshing your feed or your email is no doubt the air’s perverted technological evil twin, but nevertheless, it similarly promises a blank slate. So does alien abduction—lost time, lost memories, lost self. I can hear the way she says Mulder like mold her. She’s always at least a little open.

After contracting COVID, Lockwood grows terrified, not that she can’t breathe but that she has forgotten how to read and write, can’t tell you what any book is about, no less her phone number, or what day it is. But she realizes that her pre- and post-Covid self would underline the same paragraph about the air in Greece, which isn’t a negative, because it is a substance that can be worn, drunk, swum in, or “blown, with infinite care, into globes.” “Now that’s it,” she writes,“that’s what I remember about reading, about life: real air, so real you can write words on it, sliced into cubes and strung with pearls.”

Then, there is the time Lockwood meets the Pope: “I am ill in myself and my beloved and the world, and I am listening for the breathing of someone who has lived a small part of my life. You know you saw Sinéad O’Connor’s hands trembling when she ripped up that photo on Saturday Night Live as my chin trembled when I walked into the Sistine Chapel. Shaken by the sum of something.” I lost days of my life watching Sinéad O’Connor on YouTube, when her death felt like the only injustice I could grab with my hands as the piled-up rest of them sunk into some ether. The sum of something. Sinead’s singing is her way of breathing.

In another episode, Lockwood is scared to read the biography of her friend, a poet and writer, written by her husband after her suicide. She can’t find the way to write about her, her writing, or his writing about her. She already knows then something is up from the way she is posting online: “some people are plugged into the circuit that way. They are not mad, they are crackling with the charge in the air.” Writing about her electric air waves has to be an intimacy so easily confused with madness, because there can be no end in it, no secret to reveal about her suicide. And what else is suicide than a forever secret that can’t be cracked? She has to begin “at the end of language, someone at a bombsite or in a burned-out church, the words and phrases jarred out of their places, as if they too had heard the gunshot and started running; as if the ripples of the act, the derangement in the air, had entered into English itself.” Rewrite everything with this sullied freshness.

And one last entry, this time about men. Lockwood is merciless, and then, as is her way, she grants mercy. Finding a remote possibility of redemption for David Foster Wallace, Lockwood writes: “You open the text and it wakes. This is the thing that cannot be killed. 'Since we all breathe, all the time,' he writes at the end of The Pale King, 'it is amazing what happens when someone else directs you how and when to breathe.' The novel does this, as much as any hypnotist. The rhythms of another person's sentences do this, wind across the grid, Illinois, their attempts to keep their mother alive for all time by reproducing her idiom down to the letter. It's in your mind now: levitation.” Rising into the air through the memory of words composed of breath, attention is also breathing. Simone Weil said this somewhere. Wallace demanded a surefire attention from women that he confused with actual intimacy, in life as much as in his novels. He drags us towards him. Pages and pages. His female characters are rather paltry because of this weakness, Lockwood reminds us. So should we let him have us by reading him? Sure. We should be reassured. Reading should have the freedom to roam like the wind. Reading is different from life. Sentences carry us, mediate. Life, more medium than mediated, can brutalize.

Reading Lockwood, I feel like we should all be levitating at the edge of the alphabet, feeling the wind that composes words. Ripples that this air deranged, saturated these days, make us wish we could inhale the internet and live in clouds, rewrite some portion of everything. But writing feels like it's part of this illness that has taken over, and yet, how can writing be a bad thing? “Nabokov called America ‘the country where I’ve breathed most deeply’. It is the sky that travels down to fingertips and toes, surrounding an image which can never be held.” Nabokov breathes in this America, where real air is becoming a memory. Faint. And soon, an abduction. For those that can’t hold on to themselves for very long, we are its vessel and archive.