In Praise of Digressive Writing

Notes on footnotes etc.

Ross Gay

: “[T]o be among the living, to be life, means to be in dependence, always and forever, whether you like it or not. It means, whether you like it or not, you are the beneficiary of a largesse so large, and so deep, you will never in one lifetime get to the bottom of it. Like it or not, you will never pay it back or settle it up, even if you devote every waking second to the task.”

Daily drawing 7-8-2017: Gerard drawing at the Love Thing. Dip-pen

I woke up and picked up Ross Gay’s The Book of (More) Delights, published last year, from where it lay facedown on the other pillow.¹ I had already noticed that Gay was a fellow fan of the digressive footnote, so I was pleased to find a whole essayette dedicated to ‘(Foot- End- Etc.) Notes’.

Gay: “To my delight, I found [Katherine] McKittrick’s book [Dear Science and Other Stories] is thoroughly footnoted, not only in a standard bibliographical way, but in a digressive, contrapuntal, sub-argumentative way. By which I mean, quick glance here, it appears as though some of these footnotes are miniature essays, essayettes,² which I’m sure complicate, deepen, twist up, who knows, the text. Occasionally these footnotes are a whole page or more.

It might be the poet in me, by which I mean the writer obsessed with form in me, who is so interested in and enamored of the oddball overlong footnote, the footnote that calls into question the very idea of the ancillary…”

He then veers off into talking about his love of the acknowledgements page in books, then gets into the liner notes of hip-hop records, “which were exorbitant and vernacular in their gratitude. They were like maps of entanglement, or webs, some of which was legible to a visitor… some of which was not.” (i.e., because hip-hop artists tend to deploy nicknames, in-jokes, etc., unlike ((mostly)) poets.)

Absorbing this essayette with my fresh morning-brain (a corner of which was also busy sifting the dreams I’d just had),³ I saw that the form of listing acknowledgements in a book— form as in a done thing, not as in a shape made of words, though in truth, both— makes a stage, a place, where a person (the writer) can stand and name aloud who has helped them in their work— THIS work, the book; and also I saw how this public acknowledging of work-help doesn’t happen all that often in life. This naming-of-helpers happens in an acceptance speech for an award, but that’s still in the creative realm; it doesn’t happen, for instance, that once you’ve all finished building a house, everyone who worked on it gets a turn to stand on the roof and speak aloud the names of their family and friends and colleagues who supported and encouraged them to put that roof on.⁴

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Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift is justifiably iconic for naming the ways of the gift economy and how it relates to art practice. His book Common As Air does something similar for science. (They are both scholarly, dense books, but read them, cousin!— also Trickster Makes This World— anything by Hyde is worth reading.)⁵ Part of what he says in those books— and I’m pulling this from memory, though The Gift is right there on the shelf still, not yet packed into a box— is that ART ITSELF⁶ is a gift, because any individual work is made by standing on a mountain of culture, or to put it another way, each of us individual artists receives (for free, mostly) an inheritance of other people’s work and ideas so vast as to be uncountable before we even START to make anything of our own. And that feeling of ideas and inspirations dropping out of the blue? Gifts. The gift wants to be given in turn, and that’s why it’s hard to put a price on art work.

[Here I paused in my writing to be interviewed by my friend

Mark Fitzpatrick

for his podcast The Hollow Path - Art & Magic. We spoke in the wake of the New Moon lunar eclipse. The episode should be out in a week or so; watch this space.]

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Substack’s footnotes function spawned my footnote-habit. Previously footnotability had been denied me; I had never used software that let me insert a footnote. When I’m writing by hand, I use brackets and dashes a lot, which is a variation on the same mechanism: an inserted side-note, stones in the stream of consciousness.⁷ Online, though, I’ve acquired a set of editing instincts (grown like muscles over the last year and a half)⁸ that kick in automatically to determine how to structure information on the typed page; whether an idea should be in the main flow, or inset, or set aside, or taken out entirely. (This discretion / discrimination is a personal, felt thing.) The footnote provides a nice little intermediate place to stash aberrant thoughts; a kind of literary pocket in the garment of the essay.

The irony of my own love of the footnote is that I can be a hater of OTHER PEOPLE’S footnotes. I get how they can be annoying in the way they disrupt the seamless mind-flow of a single river of text. For some reason I don’t feel that way about Gay’s footnotes. Who can say why? Because he’s already digressive, so they’re just digression flavouring digression? Because that’s kind of the point? Because reading him is kind of like reading myself, so I get it? (Formally, tonally, I mean: and that’s another interesting thing— the convergent evolution of VOICE. He speaks my language.)

A footnotes function becomes available; footnotes appear. That makes me think of weed seeds taking root in cracks. Ideas are an opportunistic life form— they take whatever openings they can find and grow into the space available. But there is also a certain flavour of digressive think-writing (that me and Ross Gay favour in common) based on the practice of observing one’s own reactions and associations, including reactions to what is being written. I said in the podcast interview with Mark that my bodymind is the instrument I use to discern the world: I am both the instrument and the observer of the instrument. All I’m doing is noting down what arises.⁹ This way of working is easy, like having a conversation with oneself.

Subjectivity is also honest: as Gay points out, the seizing and subverting of footnotes in particular— which are usually an academic tool— offers an implicit riposte to pretended objectivity, the language of academia. (Gay is a Professor.) The idea that there even IS a main story, a true text, is brought into question. Gay says “the body of the text— which maybe we should call the midnote?” Digressive— a stepping aside— twins etymologically with deviant.

Following my nose about where to go is trusting that what interests me might interest you. As Walt Whitman said, “What I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”¹⁰ (Sidenote: littering my texts with quotes can be seen as a parallel phenomenon to the footnotes thing. It signifies a desire to bring in a chorus of other voices— counterpoints— supporting, questioning, affirming, complexifying.)

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I remembered how I was going to end this essayette. (It came to me while riding the bus yesterday in the sudden-long evening light of daylight savings.) It was this quote from Annie Dillard that gave me permission to write the way I wanted to, throwing every ingredient I could think of into the pot at once. (I’ve quoted it before, and I’ll probably do it again, too: whatever, it’s my soup, and you can have some if you want, but you don’t have to.)

Dillard says: “Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

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P.S., though— that word footnote: doesn’t it sound like the music made by walking?

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1. My habit when sleeping alone is to read until the sense stops making sense. I know it’s time to sleep when the page ahead feels too hard, like a tiny field I’m going to have to plough with my eyes. Then in the morning I wake up, pick up the book, and read a bit more before I get up. The difference between night-reading and morning-reading of the exact same page is night and day. Or in this case, every morn and every night, some are born to sweet delight. (William Blake.)

I never believed in the superiority of morning-brain until I lived alone, because I was always fatigued from what I now know is called revenge bedtime procrastination, i.e. trying to get a few moments of peace and quiet to think straight in. (How could I? It was the literal middle of the night! But we work when we can, in whatever nooks and crannies of timespace / headspace we can find.)

2. Meta!

3. Boring house-move anxiety dreams

4. There is the tradition of the roof shout, which is when the boss buys beer for the workers, but that’s more of an in-groupifying phenomenon, almost the opposite of what I’m talking about, and besides which also has shades of pizza, cake, or Christmas party, which are all ways that workplaces, bosses, and / or managers force people into accepting gifts that they may or may not want in lieu of say, raising wages etc.

5. It’s notable too that like Gay, Hyde is a poet-turned-non-fiction writer. See also: Maggie Nelson, plus probably countless others I can’t think of right now.

6. SCIENCE ITSELF

7. Re. digression WITHIN text, Rebecca Solnit has written about how the cult of brevity is gendered, and how Strunk and White is (are?) not the be-all and end-all of style. Here’s Solnit in February 2022, on the Platform of the Damned: “Someone posted a bit of Strunk & White advocating for short sentences as powerful (as if that's the main aspiration of sentences, when sentences can aspire to so many other things) and naturally yours truly revolted…
Sometimes short sentences are powerful, particularly as bringing home what long sentences built toward, and sometimes they're just choppy…
And yeah, there are good short sentences and bad ones and the same goes for long sentences, but a long sentence can sometimes weave together, modify, tease out the ambiguities, allow latitude for nuance, and give things the full complexity they deserve. A short sentence can be a walk to the fridge; a long sentence can be a pilgrimage in the night.”

I made a post in response quoting a page-long sentence from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, which Solnit then reposted. (Literary glory!)

Here is the sentence: “I heard of one infected Creature, who running out of his Bed in his Shirt, in the anguish and agony of his Swellings, of which he had three upon him, got his Shoes on and went to put on his Coat, but the Nurse resisting and snatching the Coat from him, he threw her down, run over her, run down Stairs and into the Street directly to the Thames in his Shirt, the Nurse running after him, and calling to the Watch to stop him; but the Watchmen frighted at the Man, and afraid to touch him, let him go on; upon which he ran down to the Still-yard Stairs, threw away his Shirt, and plung'd into the Thames, and, being a good swimmer, swam quite away over the River; and the Tide being coming in, as they call it, that is running West-ward, he reached the Land not till he came about the Falcon Stairs, where landing, and finding no People there, it being in the Night, he ran about the Streets there, Naked as he was, for a good while, when it being by that time High-water, he takes the River again, and swam back to the Still-yard, landed, ran up the Streets again to his own House, knocking at the Door, went up the Stairs, and into his bed again; and that this terrible Experiment cur'd him of the Plague, that is to say, that the violent Motion of his Arms and Legs stretch'd the Parts where the Swellings he had upon him were, that is to say under his Arms and his Groin, and caused them to ripen and break; and that the cold of the Water abated the Fever in his Blood.”

Then I wrote: “Rebecca Solnit has just been writing about the Strunk and White school of literature that emphasises brevity as the supreme virtue: 'Omit needless words', the famous maxim… With that fresh in mind, I couldn't help noticing how the entire first paragraph of this passage, the description of a literal 'pilgrimage in the night', is a single long sentence, as if the sentence were itself an expression of the journey. Defoe alternates between commas and semi-colons; greater and lesser pauses. The capitalisation of certain nouns makes them into signposts in the stream of text; and the journey ends with the potent word, Blood. When I read Defoe, it is as if I can hear him speaking, or see him writing, so energetic and natural is his prose: conversational, telling us stories.”

(I’ve written before about the fact that caffeine arrived in England in a single decade— the 1650s— in three different forms: tea, coffee, and chocolate; and the theory that Defoe was writing caffeinated.)

8. Still kind of puny, to be fair, or what as kids we would have jokingly called ‘pipis’ (a smaller shellfish)

9. Henry David Thoreau: “A meteorological journal of the mind. You shall observe what occurs in your latitude, I in mine.”

10. I just remembered that The Gift was also where I found Whitman— who I carry in my memory, who sustains me every day. Walt Whitman - Song of Myself