Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House, and Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being: Explosion and Flight (An Introduction to the Marvelous Paragraph Project)

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

In this time that’s like nothing we have seen before, it seems helpful to sometimes have small, specific things to concentrate on for a few minutes that have nothing to do with the news. And for those of us who love to read, that just might be a marvelous paragraph or two. A friend of mine once said, “I read for sentences,” which made me think about what I read for: characters, story, the problems we find ourselves in and have to navigate our way through, lives like or completely unlike our own (my friend reads for all of these too – she was making a dramatic point at the time). But I love splendid sentences too, and love them most when they’re in conversation with each other: a dialogue, an argument, a little dance.  A paragraph might build up details, make and then undercut points, move deeper and deeper into an idea, or ricochet from one idea to another. This project explores some favorite paragraphs and authors, looking at what they do and how.

To start off, here’s a paragraph that builds into an explosion, from the chapter “Dream House as Time Travel” in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. The book traces the story of an abusive relationship, even as it pokes into all the corners of narrative possibility. With a mix of playful invention and anguish, the short chapters take on traditional and unexpected forms, themes, and literary tropes in this reinvention of the memoir.

In this paragraph, Machado, author and character, asks a question that probably almost every one of us has asked ourselves, taking it somewhere no one else possibly could: 

One of the questions that has haunted you: Would knowing have made you dumber or smarter? If, one day, a milky portal had opened up in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would you have listened? You like to think so, but you’d probably be lying; you didn’t listen to any of your smarter, wiser friends when they confessed they were worried about you, so why on earth would you listen to a version of yourself who wrecked her way out of a time orifice like a newborn?

This paragraph sets out a paradoxical question – wouldn’t knowing always make us smarter? Then it sidesteps a straightforward answer for a thought experiment, the opening of the milky portal, the eternal desire to go back and inform the younger self. You wouldn’t have listened, Machado as narrator says – you didn’t listen your friends (that description of them as “smarter, wiser,” with its honesty and self-deprecation, feels straightforward, angry, acknowledging a truth without being resigned to it). Even the older self is lying to herself, in her fantasy (our fantasy) of stopping that earlier, reckless girl.

She knows it too. The series of questions lets the narrative voice fight the younger self for not listening to advice she never had a chance to hear, exploding her own fantasy of revising the past. Time is milky, we can’t see through it in either direction.

And then there’s that blistering final clause – “so why on earth would you listen to a version of yourself who wrecked her way out of a time orifice like a newborn?” The rage and regret has erupted into the metaphor of wreckage, the birth as terrible as any entrance into the world. (“Why didn’t anyone tell me what it was like?” asked a woman dear to me, after her first baby was born. “I would never have done this. All the women I know who’ve had babies. Could someone have warned me?” Late in her next pregnancy, she said, “I don’t really remember what it was like. I think it hurt. But if we didn’t forget, we wouldn’t go on having babies.”) Machado’s time orifice combines sex and horror, refusing the comfort of forgetting, a sci fi moment in which time itself becomes a body.

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

Here’s another paragraph I love, from one of my favorite novels, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, in which one of the POV characters, Nao, a schoolgirl in all kinds of internal and external trouble, has just met “the ghost of my dead great-uncle, who just happened to be a kamikaze fighter pilot in World War II.” She’s furious with herself for singing a French chanson to him and perhaps driving him away.

What is wrong with me? I could have asked him about all sorts of things. I could have asked him about his interests and his hobbies. I could have asked him if only depressed people cared about philosophy, and if reading philosophy books ever helped. I could have asked him about what it felt like to be ripped from his happy life and forced to become a suicide bomber, and if the other guys in his unit picked on him because he wrote French poetry. I could have asked him how he felt when he woke up on the morning of his mission, which was also his last morning on earth. Did he have a big cold fish dying in the hollow of his stomach? Or was he filled with a luminous calm that emanated from him so that everyone around him stood back in awe, knowing that he was ready to take to the sky?

Like Machado’s, this paragraph also begins with a furious inquiry to the self for her past action, though here it’s the recent past. Because of this, she has all the alternatives right to hand: what she might have asked him instead. Simple questions at first, about interests and hobbies, then more elaborate and less answerable questions about whether philosophy helps.

That repetition of “I could have asked…” creates a framework for the paragraph to unfold from everyday language and concepts into a lyric, imaginative flight, echoing in its form what Nao describes, the lifting towards her uncle’s final flight, the ways she imagines he could have felt.

By the end, the paragraph is ready to fly, though she’ll be bringing us back to earth hard in the very next line. But there’s a moment of lightness here, of possibility. That maneuver of unanswerable question after unanswerable question turns the rage, believably, almost naturally, into the possibility of wonder.