The Lights Went Down a Long Time Ago

On "Mother's Breast" and the post as a literary form.

Mother’s Breast is a chapbook of about 20 pages, first published as such by the late Morgan Vogel a number of years ago, through her Organ Bank imprint. Said imprint has recently been revived to carry on her legacy, making the text once again available. Before this, Mother’s Breast was a series of posts on Tumblr. Mother’s Breast, the chapbook, is the most successful attempt at this sort of online-to-print translation I’ve ever read, and this makes it, I believe, an important work.

This is something I think about often: the problem of translating “posts” into books. It’s a problem because all writing is structured by its context and method – social media is designed to feel ephemeral (although, of course, this is only really true from a UX perspective; user data is too valuable to ever be destroyed), and it encourages forms of language which surrender themselves happily to this ephemerality – which embrace the fleeting impermanence and churning decontextualization (or, perhaps, hypercontextualization; the effect is alienation either way) of “dashboards,” “timelines”, “stories”, et cetera, forms of language which tend to become inert, even illegible, when plucked from the stream. A book of posts, presented in the most obvious, “neutral” sort of way, is akin to a case full of insects, neatly skewered on pins; the beauty, even the sublimity, of the creature can still be appreciated, but something vital has been lost.

This matters because not only is “the post” a literary form, it’s arguably the literary form of our age, but it’s being done on platforms which are hostile to history, to archiving, to preservation, whose profit models call for a User falling ever forward into the timeless Now, last week always a dissipating memory, and which therefore are designed to frustrate efforts at picking up the wreckage accumulating behind us, much less studying it, sitting with it, trying to make something of it. Worse, the post is itself a form, shaped as it has been by such platforms, which is resistant to such efforts, being almost always open-ended, unresolved, terminating only in the abruptness of death or account suspension. Mother’s Breast has the advantage of an ending – sudden and seemingly arbitrary, but nonetheless representative of a conscious decision to stop, complete with a closing post to serve as a capstone. This is, some might argue, what makes it possible for it to be a book, what gives it just enough shape to function as a conventional, pre-internet narrative, but I don’t really think so. I think the effect would be almost identical if it simply stopped, like a falling body hitting pavement. No, the real reason it works is because it understands why posts matter, what makes them good – it understands why and how they’re read, and it understands what needs to happen for all that to be retained by ink on a page. Most importantly, it understands all this particularly in relation to Gnat’s posts, not to the idea of a “post” in general; Vogel, in her editing, takes the problem of translation as seriously as if it were from foreign language. Which, in a sense, it is.

Mother’s Breast is presented as one unbroken stream of text flowing across 20 pages, 20 blocks of justified letters top to bottom, sometimes a bit skewed because this is a chapbook being made by someone in their apartment – the handmade factor is relevant, because posts are also handmade, but the basic layout is what’s most important. It creates a text space which is both fluid and overwhelming – phrases, images, ideas slam into each other gracelessly, without capitalization, all on the same plane of dead, dried thought. There’s nothing distinguishing the end of one post from the start of another – it would be easy to assume, if one were unfamiliar with the actual source, that the entire thing was actually written like this, as a single unwieldy chunk vomited forth onto the page direct from the consciousness. In a sense, of couse, it was. The effect is an imitation not of the appearance of a Tumblr blog, but rather the actual experience of scrolling through one, one where there’s nothing but text, blocks of letters sent blindly into the digital void, particular when posted but now blurring together as you take them all in, each one buried beneath its successor like so many corpses in a grave. Let’s be clear: this is an impressive feat of editing and book design, and something that should be studied by anyone working with similar material. For all the apparent bluntness and simplicity of the approach, it demonstrates an understanding of the source material as deep and subtle as a Classical scholar has for the rhythms of ancient Greek.

I’m aware I have said very little about the writing in itself. This isn’t because it’s uninteresting – it’s very, very good – so much as because I feel much more capable of talking about objects, such as books, than words, which are always at least somewhat unbearable. Nonetheless, a few comments: Mother’s Breast is a very morbid text. It has the patina of failed abortion. It’s a place where the lights went down a long time ago. As a writer, Gnat’s affect is flat, depressive, detached in a way that suggests heavy medication and an unrealized capacity for violence. This is not to say that it’s overly “serious”; there are jokes, many jokes, but they aren’t the kind that make you laugh aloud, generally, and they’re often nearly indistinguishable from the general procession of events, such that it’s unclear what’s a “bit” and what’s sincere. The environment is vaguely suburban Pennsylvania and the subject is adolescence, creating a landscape of empty swimming pools and “avalanche” sessions, where the object is to bring the target as close to death as possible without killing them. Brown grass and white vinyl siding. Everything deformed. Anthrax and mom’s liquor cabinet. As previously discussed, there’s no real shape to the narrative – things just happen, and then we move on. As we must. Nothing is taken up in any prolonged way and nothing in particular is resolved. It’s a reminder that American life, especially in its grottier cul-de-sacs of middle class aspirants and downwardly mobile denialists, is becoming more threadbare every day; to read Mother’s Breast is to wander up to the edges of the ever-expanding holes in the stretched-thin social fabric, peer into the void underneath, and think about what kinds of pills you could put up your nose tonight.

Mother’s Breast comes in a clear plastic baggie printed with a Bar Mitzvah invitation. Inside it, along with the chapbook, is a postcard-sized photo of someone, their face hidden by locks of shiny brown hair, kneeling outside, hands clasped in prayer to a small religious icon raised up on a post, like a birdhouse. The scene is lit by camera flash; it’s the middle of the night. It’s an ambiguous image. Why it’s even included in the package isn’t really clear, but it feels right. Like any good post, it’s divorced from its context. I’ve thought about putting it up on my wall, but what would be the point?