Nickels

Introduction by Anya Achtenberg

IntroductionThis is not just a great book; it is something of a miracle.

So, why an introduction? Shouldn’t a great book speak for itself? Yes, and it does. But it speaks a language somewhat different from mainstream English.

So then is this “different” language an aesthetic choice? In part, I think, yes, but the real choice precedes the crafting of the work. The author, who is indeed very well trained in mainstream English, has chosen to write Nickels in its true language, in the language that her early and continuing severe trauma from extreme s****l and physical violence has created. This is a language that cracks open the world to allow people to see the truth. This is a language that takes as its task a highly pressurized work upon itself, the work of cracking open language that seals in the world at times, making it impermeable to truth. Stark’s language is in a sense less mediated, yet fully developed in its art.

Does this sound mysterious, to read something in a new language?

Don’t worry. The book itself, the reading itself, will teach you. And it begins with a language all of us who were children first spoke; it gives voice to a child’s voice and a child’s world, so we are beckoned in with recognition and tenderness.

The other somewhat disturbing fact, but in a sense a relief to admit, is that many of us, so many of us for so many reasons, speak the language of trauma and dissociation. We are, in a cruel sense, native speakers; in a necessary and loving sense, a community.

We know from depictions of trauma in literature, and we understand from experience, that some situations stretch time, kick us out of our bodies. Ambrose Bierce, in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” gave us Confederate gentleman and saboteur Peyton Farquhar, who in the moment between falling through the bridge, and the Union noose breaking his neck, lived, with superhuman strength and magical sensory abilities, a lifetime of escape and return to his beloved, to die then in her arms; but in “normal” reality, he died alone under the bridge, hanged.

We know from car accidents the stretching of time, the adrenalin that slows it all down so we react or we watch, through each degree of the 360 as the car rolls over and our lives turn around us.

But the language of trauma here in Nickels is not the language of a moment, a single event we relive and tell about, perhaps a bit compulsively, until it loses its powerful flare up of terror. This is the language of continuing and repeated trauma, and it cracks open the world to reveal something we must know, the grit that makes the pearl, the truth of the world that challenges hypocrisy. I am one of those who believe that what we do not face, kills us. What we do not admit of the ugliness of the world, takes us down, and deforms that beauty that most assuredly dances around the earth. But like Farquhar, as he is being hung, the narrator of this story indeed watches, using her “waiting eyes” to “store it in [her] brain”, and I suggest that it is this ability, these eyes, which have led to the gifted vision we see the character develop later in the book as a visual artist.

There are other books, and there will be many more, that treat the subject of the terrible violences against children which make the backdrop of our daily lives; which say that no matter how lovely it may look on one street, we have work to do.

But this book?

This is the motherboard; this, the hidden circuitry we dress up to attempt to tell a story and be understood. There are other books, fine books, which are indicators; they point to the hidden circuitry. They point to this book.

This is enough reason to read this beautiful and brutal work. But there is more.

This book reopens the world of childhood. Beauty is here. Unbearable innocence. Hope is here. Maneuvering around ogres. The sheer terror of childhood, here.

In this land between breakfast and nightmare, with its “imaginary” companions, and a cast of characters only the child could name—oatmeal lady, suit man, spider leg lady, mad dad—stories unfold of how Little Miss So And So maneuvers through and survives, how crazy girl encounters her first friend, and how she finds ways to see beauty, experience it, and create it. These are stories I would not miss.

Need more reasons to read this book? Stark brings us back to the transformative blossoming of first love, the love of our narrator for another young girl. She also writes of the girl athlete crazy girl, in a magical way I have never before seen. “I am pure speed,” Stark’s narrator says as she makes a moment-by-moment opening into the basketball game, into this saving power within this girl, who does, “float like a butterfly; sting like a bee.” It is perhaps that slowing and stretching of time, that floating away from the body in that limitless time that stretches before the neck of the moment is broken, that brings this young woman also to have an artist’s eye and gift, which Stark describes hypnotically as the character is compelled into making art.

And Stark accomplishes something in Nickels which presents a great and often opaque challenge to writers struggling with using a narrative voice that must show development over many years in stories beginning with childhood.

This exile from straight[forward] time is somehow an expert in it, not only showing a different kind of time or showing time in a new way, but also quite capably showing the shifts in “actual” time, informing the reader of these shifts through subtleties in the development of the narrative voice. She crafts or discovers the very distinct voices of her narrator over time, over the span of the narrator’s telling; at the same time there is a necessary blurring as one moment comes back to be present in another, both crucial tasks for this narrator.

It is perhaps Stark’s defeat of straight time, along with the powerful bringing forward of symbols, which eventually brings this story from the dramatic realm into the mythical, as well. Her arrival at the merging of the character’s experience into the mythical realm, into her understanding of the beginning of the world with its ancient taboos and the horrific consequences of their violation, is stunning. The section including the story, “The Girl Who Dragged Her Entrails Through Life Behind Her on The Ground,” is prominent among the many sections of this book which must turn up anthologized.

Crazy girl lives tethered to the extreme pole of injustice, being made the last, the one who most knows the edge of the world, whose knowledge is central, and most repressed. Her knowledge remains something that society works most energetically to make invisible, to keep hidden behind the opaque social wall.

So, we need this book. It brings forth in the reader such a powerful wave of love and tenderness, such a deep desire to care for the children, the daughters, unable to be argued with. This is a great work to do in the world.

Stark says, “the body remembers the emotions recall what the mind cannot hold the mind is a sieve the mind is an imperfect entity alone however in cooperation with the body and the emotions operating with a perfect genius.” I have come to think that Stark operates in this book with a perfect genius that makes the impossible in expression, possible; the unknowable in experience, knowable.

So, prepare yourself, although, really, you cannot, for a tidal wave of brilliance, an arrival at a language both intimate and mythical for what we call the “unspeakable”, and for irreplaceable gifts that make their way forward, convincing me that anything I want to save, can be saved; anything I want to make as beauty with its inextricable link to truth, can be created.

Anya Achtenberg

Minneapolis, 2011