WHAT WE CARRY: IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTINE BETTIS’ BURNOUT PARADISE
1.
Sometimes I want to read in a different way, in that I ignore the old adage that the text should stand alone, and instead I consider the position of the author as a scaffold holding up the text. Or the author might be said to resemble a garment of loosely gathered, interwoven threads, a sinewy dress the text wears. Or maybe the author, the position of the author, should most be likened to a palimpsest. What bleeds through into the text we are reading from the document (the authorial life) underneath? How much of this bleed-through is intentional, how much a projection of the reader likening speaker to author — because, of course, poetry can also be fiction — and how much is accidental? In Burnout Paradise (Horse Less Press), Christine Bettis chooses intention. In a note that precedes the main body of the poems that make up the chapbook, Bettis writes: “Burnout Paradise is a series of diseased poems that drives itself into an IRL/online hybrid grid, full of danger, symptomatic loops, and decaying layers in pursuit of the cure. This work is loosely autobiographical, as I’ve included images, sensations, and memories from my experiences moving across the country multiple times for work and school while grappling with illness and isolation.” I consider these words to be a gift from the author. Bettis is offering me a platform, a starting point, maybe even a ladder to the poetry that follows. There’s a boldness at work here too. Poetry, and writing in general, is open to multiple interpretations, probably because it is frequently (hopefully) read by more than one person. We all bring ourselves to the text, to what we read (or to what we see, in the case of visual art). With this simple note, though, and its placement before the text (as opposed to at the end of the chapbook, where notes usually appear), Bettis appears to be saying that her own experience is paramount, vital even, to a reading of the text. I think she’s telling us: A lot is at stake.
2.
Of course, I’m also at stake. I bring a lot to my own reading of Burnout Paradise. I sit here at my desk in my own suit of skin, muscle, bone. My life has been full of movement, in the form of geographic displacement, as well as illness. I connect to this writing over and over, for example when Bettis writes of driving past cows and corn fields and finishes the section with the following:
Dialing back these distorted signals
How can we even communicate in transmission?
“Can’t”
“Aggressively”
“Elsewhere”
I read into these poems and these lines a discussion of travel — or at the very least, into certain kinds of travel — as anti-exotic. We so often romanticize the peripatetic lifestyle. Who knows, maybe there is something to be said for living a life that is portable, for not being tied down to any one geographic location. But as Bettis continuously points out in Burnout Paradise, we take ourselves with us. There’s nothing exotic about the self, nothing new, or strange. Maybe you will argue: but we are constantly discovering ourselves. Though I would agree with you, I would also point out that we rarely, if ever, manage to transcend the circumstances of our specific lives. Certainly not when we are dealing with something as visceral as an illness. (See: “It’s this memory that will metastasize / and eclipse my everyday after you’re gone / A baited trap I recognize”; or “I walk to you in a steady pace under the sky / although the sky is all around me as air / still above the ground in a medicated state”; “Medical graphs mutate into semi-truck sensoriums”. Here, and elsewhere, Bettis uses the language of illness to describe surroundings, emotional states, etcetera. Why? Maybe because: “Nowhere to run, baby. Nowhere to hide.”)
Elsewhere, Bettis writes:
In L.A. I’m the help —
Can’t get a doctor’s appointment
Can’t afford car insurance
and I know you’re going to leave me
I walk the neighborhoods and touch other people’s succulents
Now I’m asking myself: what would it mean to be able to keep a succulent, or any plant, alive? To have the economic and personal power/energy to invest in a little botany as a hobby. An outdoor garden, like the ones housing the succulents the poet describes touching in L.A. invokes, at least to me, the idea of puttering. You know, movement that is connected to a slow, unforced leisure, that is wholesome, restorative. I end up spending a lot of time on this succulent thing. I ask myself: why can’t you keep a plant alive. I’m a notorious plant killer and to my husband’s dismay, I don’t enjoy gardening, though I’ve never examined why that might be. I think, though, that I’ve found the answer in Burnout Paradise. In the last poem in the chapbook, “Las Vegas, Until it Feels Real,” Bettis writes:
(Make the room dark. Buy plants and let the die on the surfaces in your
apartment. Find a body of water and throw the dead plants on top. Take
their picture from a ladder. Grow old and continue to allow many things
that don’t bleed to die in your apartment.)
I love this. I absolutely do. And though I’m certainly aware that there may be many people who experience illness and/or geographic displacement just like I do, all while loving plants, while nursing their green thumbs, I am not one of those people. I connect to these lines so completely, it’s like catharsis. Maybe in a life grounded in illness, or at the very least, in some such lives (because illness is everywhere: “How doctors treat me like I won’t remember, how doctors won’t talk about the weather. All of the women in this family have worn hospital gowns and walked cold houses. I intend to resume long dead rituals.”), letting something die could be seen as a luxury. When one is ill, so much care has to be taken with the body, or with the mind, with the part of body or mind that is ailing, with the body/mind as one entity, in order to survive, both literally and figuratively. For the poet, for this reader, staying alive is key. Sometimes I look at the plants in my house and know they need water, desperately. And then I walk away. I don’t water them. I do something else. As I read Burnout Paradise, I’m continuously doing something else. Even as I’m reminded of many of my own thoughts and feelings, I’m considering the position of the poet, the speaker, who moves through her own world, full of her own concerns. I leave the chapbook thinking about connection, about what binds us to each other. Language is a tie, I think, a ribbon we can use to attach ourselves to others, or in this case to what we read, in order to fight against the isolation so often arising from the particularities of our own unique life experiences, from the effects of movement, illness, or whatever else our lives may bring our way. Burnout Paradise is, for me at least, a text full of these ribbons.
3.
In closing, I will say: we always exist within our most current self. In other words, perhaps we could say that the sixth sense is the sense of location. I found this out the hard way, during an out-of-body experience after swallowing too much Tylenol-3 Codeine. There I was in my bed, watching my body in the bed. I was perpendicular to my own body. Clearly, the form that I was slipping out of was my body, but equally clear to me was that I existed inside of a space that was mine, that contained me somehow, but that was separate from my body. For that moment, I was both somewhere else and yet rooted in my new location. In the months and years (many years) since that weird morning, I’ve thought a lot about what happened. I’ve parsed the memory, really cut it apart, and pasted it together again. Based on my experience, I decided that I could never truly leave myself behind. I started to distrust the notion of objectivity, especially when applied to human murkiness — I’m talking about emotions, thoughts, evaluating the experiences of other humans. Perhaps this is why I’ve become such a big fan of subjectivity, or better said, of acknowledging it. I want us, as readers and writers, to be honest about our own subjectivities (locations). We are always where we are, looking out at our surroundings, drawing the external world into our orbits. (This, I think, is how many of us experience our senses.) We carry location with us and this location informs how we experience the events of our lives. Our locations, I think, can be a trap, but also a gift. I would argue that when we are honest about our own subjectivity/locations, when we strive to understand the emotional/physical space we inhabit at any given moment, when we acknowledge our own unique vantage points, we may more fully approach other humans and the life situations we face, not to mention what we read or see, with our full hearts, our powers of empathy, our renewed ability to connect. This, all of this, is what swells up, what I am reminded of, when I bring myself to Christine Bettis’ Burnout Paradise.
