A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles reemphasized language to me. 17. Had not read obsessively in years. Five or more. Long time. Shameful. Little bit of a problem, I thought. Quietly. I used to love reading. It felt so good. Twice-baked potatoes. A good fire. Gives more than it took. Fortnite took nothing. Well. It took everything in me to not smash my controller against the chair. Again. So I was sad about moving. Lonely. The word never appeared in my brain, because I stopped reading. I got a phone.

11th grade. Six months until I must realize The Thing to be done with my life. For College. Keeping that in the back of my mind. The quiet. Die down Loud. The skills. The many past skills. The lack thereof. The dropping. Quitting. Bored. Light brown skin passionless until? 17. A friend recommends a book. Yeah well anyways I think you’d really like it. Secrets take their time. Sentences are the sweetest keeper. Like country roads, taken. Reading. Roundabout sentences. Their own logic.

Upon further review this evening, it was the third chapter that sucked me in. The Count (the eponymous Gentleman) undertakes a collection of Montaigne’s essays but struggles to stay interested, despite part of him saying, over and over, this is important. Hello me, I thought. Look at what a story can do with words. 

I’m facing a lot of opposition, so I will address it before I continue. Yes, this is an academic essay, and we will turn it into such together. I (and you all, though it is okay if I do not refer to you) must be willing to allow interruptions like this one, so that continuation does not pave over anyone’s insight, but meaning is set in motion, emended and extended. In an attempt at Realism, I will acknowledge that I am aware of how ridiculous this may turn out. The Professor may understand this writing as a try, technically, an experiment.

Asked for by The Opposition—alright now, let’s remember that we’re infighting; we all want the same thing. Okay. Fine, you’re not oppositional (though I find little difference in outfighting). I am being asked to share my plan. I plan to write about the sentences of Lyn Hejinian (Vague!). To animate knowledge explaining the lauded glory power her grand vision that her sentences breathe. I believe that Hejinian embarked upon a life-long, inherited (from Stein, by me) project of making the reality of her consciousness meaningful to her reader. Thus, sentences breathed. At stake in the public life of a writer… [is] the invention of the meanings and meaningfulness of his or her writing. It was important for Hejinian to elaborate these meanings. Thus, I must do the same with my own writing, for I revere the meaningfulness of Lyn Hejinian.

The girl in front of me in the library who I have been off-handedly observing for the past hour has been scrolling through a long Word doc on the library desktop, highlighting clunky clauses that stand out, plugging the clauses into an LLM, and consulting. I conject that they are a consultant. The Human In The Loop. Patient. Careful. Skillful. Consulting the revision of sentences that seem like sentences an AI might have written. Though, it may be important to say that this essay is written in English, and this AI speaks Chinese. Perhaps this person is simply translating and perhaps that is just their natural prose style. Quizas, quizas, quizas….

What is it about Hejinian that we revere? Good question, my friend. Do I feel like summarizing feelings of the past four months, careful to subvert the normative syntax of a summary so as to stay somewhat interesting? No, not really. Skills. She’s skillful. She wields the sentence like an extension of her arm. Instead: I have been wanting (in the back, quietly) to write for some time about a vision I had, a recurring view that I’m not really sure what to do with. 

Speeches are an answer. . . .

The scene opens and they have a valley before them.

A Valley. The Skills of the World. Improvement. Better better better. The view. Trails. Each trail, a hundred trails. One trail a million trails. Every trail a new trail. 10,000 things in the valley below waiting for familiarity to be embarked upon, down one trail, up another. Like a skill-tree. In video games. First, you unlock jumping. Then you practice your way up or down jumping’s skill tree until you’ve unlocked double jumps, flips, jump-dodges. Then you’ve worked your way through jump tree, and shooting tree, and kicking tree. Now you’ve got jump-flip-ground slam. You’ve learned back-flip-tornado-kick. Combos. Skills. Subversion. Broken down and recombined, artfully, like techniques. Mastery. You’ve walked up and down the valley and learned the hollows in every oak housing each horned owl. Only there’s too much. In fact, you’ve stayed in your room. Actually haven’t done any of that yet because the view of the valley is quite a lot to take in. Nothing specific. The trails? Made up. No trails. For all I know. Just trees and birds and vines and and moss and and and night creatures. Fail. Fantasy. Stasis. Goodbye redemption. Hello Red Dead.

I don’t know (Yes you do). The idea is 

I feel horrible. So much pressure, and you’re staring at me waiting to explain myself and I don’t know how to get better if I don’t say something without exploding, which I somehow never do

Deep Breath. I am writing that multiplicity (I, you, we) as the reality of consciousness is the defining term by which I can invent myself as a writer. Like anything, multiplicity can be seen as a tool, skillfully or unskillfully wielded. Its uses can be hierarchized or spread horizontally. Above is a story that faces the two off. Progress up vs process across. I have no exterior community of writers writing with multiplicity anterior and internalized. Therefore I must validate the interior community—the system of Parts that define my (our, if you may) multiplicitous existence. 

The community creates the context in which the work’s happening happens…. To be simultaneously permissive and rigorous is the challenging task that a highly functional community must attempt.

The community is within, and functional or dys, is constantly at work; they are making, sure, and therefore happening happens. Our interior communities resemble meaningful exterior dynamics—often characterized and always complicated by opposing impulses. Parents, or, fellow children. Impulses, or, intentions. Our communities are often or always oppositional. Love, care, trying. Intentions make themselves known historically, diachronously, in terms of choices, which in turn or spurn cause effects. Effects composing an internal community. 

In analyzing the realm of the interior, I intend on re-enveloping knowledge. Interior communities must be written about, analyzed, narrated, for more intimate understandings with and within ourselves. This writing process must be multiplicitous, diachronous and synchronous, simultaneously. Yes, a moment in time, surely, spread out across a space, definitely. A landscape. Landscapes. A collation, collaboration of temporalities within a single work. Yes, the interior community is a system in use and complete at any given moment. But emphases are unevenly distributed across the work of shared-being composed by the parts of the interior community. Some parts of the community feel themselves being emphasized constantly, are prone to taking center stage. In the work of good personhood, emphases are not panoramic. What is emphasized is rarely wholeness nor wholesome. Emphases can feel like spotlights. Like wounds. Like fixing your hair, and listening in ways that seem genuine. Emphases are intentional, though rarely explicit. Hejinian has a rare skill for elucidating intention, which we’ll see later. Accumulating within parts of the interior system who feel history is being re-emphasized, and in turn express their analysis. Analysis of emphasis is an act of synchronous time travel, exploring stories gathered over time. 

The question of community and creativity is not one issue but a whole complex of interrelated public and private issues, and as one brings the pressure of one’s attention to bear on one of them, another of them rises up, requiring that one adjust one’s emphasis. But this adjusting of emphasis is essential to keeping the relationship between oneself and the community viable and productive. 

I pay attention to the unified, linear tone of Who Is Speaking?, and I believe this piece was arranged for comprehension, not expressing. Clarity seems to pulse towards an imagined reader, who has been, and must then remain external to the porous and unclear internal community that we characterize joyously to be Lyn Hejinian. Clarity is to help, which may be embarrassing, stifling, distracting from confusion to a community seeking camaraderie. Texts are written to be, and should be. 

Writing is narrated by the internal community. Narrates negotiations between. If the sentence and the form are composed so as to present as unified community, chances are, the text will inadequately, dishonestly represent the conditions of conflicting intentions informing the text. The sentence is always an honest representation of the intentions of any external history—a sterilized sentence is desperate to be clean, terrified, terrorized away from messiness. This is what makes a sentence emotional, and a paragraph not. The emotions of those inside cause me to-

-no, no not cause, because I don’t have power over you. I just think cause is stupid. I’m telling you, I am concerned you might be or feel unloveably stupid, having said cause instead of another word, a word less forceful.

The intentions of those inside—like those who try that we don’t say anything perceivable as stupid—assert themselves emotionally to the internal community. And so emotionally construct the sentence. The text is anterior to the composition, though the composition be interior to the text. Such candor is occasionally flirtatious, as candor is nearly always so. When it is trustworthy, love accompanies the lover, and the centric writers reveal their loyalty, a bodily loyalty. If one (not person but part) witnesses everyone in the world ensuring that stupidity stays silent, then avoiding stupid thoughts and phrasings will rise to the forefront of the community’s compositional emphases. To this part, the text must avoid stupidity. To other parts of me, this essay must represent my multiplicitous thoughts, stupid and all. So, we return into conflict, for what is important should be communicated, but the importance of stupidity is that it must not be communicated. Many such cases. Like the Chinese AI, ensuring it cannot be seen. She seeks to shift the blame (the radical negative otherizing) from herself onto Deepseek. The bad faith othering of Parts’ intentions perpetuates positive feedback trauma cycles. An intention to heal; Acknowledgement of hurt; Denial of any concern (Shut up, I’m not stupid); Silencing; Othering; Pain; Need to heal. This is the cycle inviting kinship between nearly every writer I know, kinship often denied. We wish to heal by writing but cannot articulate why or how and so do not. Multiplicity is a form that provides an opening. Into community. 

stupidity makes friends

a little low tranquillity shall I not praise?

the crosswise aim of making visible

to be exact now

The reader wants to share in the author’s ecstasy in arriving at the sentence in which crosswise aims intersect. When we are no longer tracing the trajectory of the writing process, listening to those internal struggles, but have arrived at agreement. I too love those moments. I know they are the rarest. Here’s a good example:

My inten­tion (I don't mean to suggest that I succeeded) in a subsequent work, “Resistance,” was to write a lyric poem in a long form—that is, to achieve maximum vertical intensity (the single moment into which the idea rushes) and maximum horizontal extensivity (ideas cross the landscape and become the horizon and weather).(6) To myself I proposed the paragraph as a unit representing a single moment of time, a single moment in the mind, its content all the thoughts, thought particles, impressions, impulses—all the di­verse, particular, and contradictory elements—that are included in an active and emotional mind at any given instant. For the mo­ment, for the writer, the poem is a mind.

Upon that final sentence, the reader [read: me] experiences a joy, an imagination, a valley. The view is of responsibility and freedom: poem as mind, text as writer, moment acquiring noble personhood in the eyes of the author. I excitedly fast forward inside, into a future trek down The Hejinian-Butte Trail of fantastical multiplicitous writings, but, petrified by the darkness (night, or, remembered silence) vignetting into the frame, part of me shuts the thing off, shoves the fantasy aside, and scrolls down to the next paragraph in The Rejection of Closure. 

My moments may be not good

Breathing between the words 

Someone wrong

But if I lie

Then I won’t prove

Wrong wrong

How do I navigate synchrony when somewhere lurking in any landscape there exists him, he who bears the mark? 

Oh. That’s important. He asks that because writing can be therapeutic. Synchrony disables time travel, narrativity, for science. …the story is only of importance if you like to tell or like to hear a story but the relation is there anyway. But the story has not been heard. Too many of us unheard and crying. Fucking stupid the backlog. Should be therapeutic. Imperative. Can form go even further than that and actually generate that potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plenitude? Yes. Go farther: stay with curiosity, and ask around. Plenitude is not the feeling of knowing, of being speculated on. Wholeness knows only multiplicity, or, being listened to by you. 

Getting from the beginning to the end of a statement is simple movement; fol­lowing the connotative byways (on what Umberto Eco calls “in­ferential walks”) is complex or compound movement. Movement across time is complex movement. Movement across intentions, to bring intentions together is complex movement. The connotative byways must echo down forgotten elementary hallways and remember those impressions that hit you across the face, singled outside of the classroom: Everyone around me thinks there’s something wrong with me. 

Some conclusions follow: in order to communicate insights that need to be heard, we can allow ourselves to communicate insights that are not wanted to be heard, like stupidity, or distraction. Sentences can represent the relationship between parts of a person. We can interpret contradiction and confusion as successfully communicated contradiction and confusion, and not failure. The reader can honor vulnerability with patience. Good work results from a relaxation of tightness and conflict within the internal community, however that may occur, not the other way around. Writing our oft-neglected and blamed thoughts can be relaxing, cathartic. If to think is to dance, it is to fall while dancing, as well; it is to dance among geese and elephants. Also, of course, it is to dance among albatrosses.

I read that knowing now that I have so much passion, not too much. There is simply an endless backlog of passions and burning desires. Soon I will hear that story about Ms. Chastise and the classmates’ stares on the page. For now you know as well as I that he is still suffering. Lyn Hejinian shows us that we should can alleviate our suffering by writing with regard to a multiplicitous process. I hope to help.