LIVING POSTHUMOUSLY By Leah Mensch A CREATIVE PROJECT SUBMITTED TO ANDER MONSON AND THE GHOST OF KATE BRAVERMAN IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE TINY CABINET AND ANSWERING THE QUESTION WHY KATE BRAVERMAN MATTERS.

 

LIVING POSTHUMOUSLY 

By 

Leah Mensch

A CREATIVE PROJECT SUBMITTED TO ANDER MONSON AND THE GHOST OF KATE BRAVERMAN IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE TINY CABINET AND ANSWERING THE QUESTION WHY KATE BRAVERMAN MATTERS. 

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Preface

by 

Leah Mensch

Call it 1986. Sonoma. North of Berkeley. Kate Braverman doesn’t even know why she’s here. She’d wanted to go to Stanford, or back to Berkeley, but time had run out to apply and enroll, and anywhere was better than Los Angeles. Two years earlier, unable to garner any interest in her second novel, she quit cocaine and drove upstate four hours on a whim, three weeks into August. Classes were to start in a week. Sonoma was the only university that would allow her to enroll in a master’s program so late into the summer.  

Now, she’s finishing her master’s thesis, walking through abandoned stripmalls to keep her toddler distracted during spare hours—as if there really are any—chain smoking at her typewriter. She’s aching for Los Angeles, writing the preface of her thesis, though she’ll never say it aloud, never admit her enduring roots to the city that broke her heart. She’s driving taxis to pay her rent. Just outside the city lies an industry disguised as landscape: sprawling vineyards and carnal wines—though none of this matters because Braverman is sober. She lives her truth, or a version of her truth: Poetry must dare. It must take risks. It must be dangerous. Take it as you will. It’s the great love of her life (so is the poem, so is the syllable) and the thesis cares only about the love affair. 

*

Kate Braverman wanted to disappear. She wrote an entire memoir grieving her inability to disappear, even though she already had, by then to some degree.  But the disappearance was supposed to be a product of her own consent. She was supposed to find enough meaning to disappear, and inside the meaning, the means. Or so I thought. 

I used to think I conducted this project with irony but I don’t anymore. 

When she died in 2019, she left little behind, having destroyed much of her archive in the making slowly over the last twenty years of her life. Now, in northern California, in a lifelong friend’s study, there are many boxes. These boxes contain twelve authored mostly out of print books, correspondences, poems, two manuscripts, artwork, and recorded, digital, and analog material. Inside these boxes, is the circumference of Kate Braverman’s life. 

And these boxes are supposed the answer the one question that has outlived her. The one question I can’t answer. The question of why she matters. And how could they? 

She’s hardly there. I’m trying to find her. 

*

I heckled the very nice Sonoma State librarian for weeks before I was able to get A scan of Braverman’s thesis. When I do finally have a copy in my hands, I am surprised to see that nearly all of the poems remained unpublished. I don’t think I am supposed to think Living Posthumously is the best thing she ever wrote—but I do. 

They ask point blank, If the poem is above all / an act of innocence / What the hell / would you die for?  They ask if a poem can be an aesthetic of destruction. (I am not supposed to answer, but I think yes, as you are looking at my own destruction of her master’s thesis). They ask about the erotics of time. These are not the questions that outlived her, but they are the questions I care about. 

The poems demand you create your own lover, and imagine Braverman’s. Sometimes it’s Los Angeles, a man, a woman, the jacaranda trees, the poem. What it elicits more than the shape of a lover is the shape of betrayal and ambivalence, torment and obsession and earnestness. Relics of being inside the world, a prayer of the afterlife. And then the poems destroy and ask you in return, what saved your life. 

Living Posthumously casts away the question of why poetry matters, why Kate Braverman matters, why anything matters, really. And the manuscript, the speaker, is  a smattering of the voice which haunts her work beginning, middle, and, end. She wrote this early in her career, if you look at the circumference. I still think the voice is her ghost. 

And I think the ghost says, take my words or leave them. 

*

Dear Kate Braverman, 

Is the library archive as it “should” function a myth? A “good” archivist fashions posthumous living through boxes: authored books, correspondences, unpublished poems, artwork, and recorded, digital, analog material. The traditional library archive can function as a tributary or a dam, depending on the researcher’s discretion. We can hold things, touch them, lift them, pretend they are ours. When they get too heavy, we can put them away and walk home and cook dinner and go to bed. A good archivist, in a traditional sense at least, does not talk to the dead.

 I am not good. And I am not an archivist. I am not even a researcher. 

*

Every person who has ever asked me why Kate Braverman matters is a person who has never explained to me why anything  matters. They have, instead, handed me a poem, a story, an essay and said, “look.” When I haven’t seen what I needed to see to survive or understand or riff or grow, they’ve held my hand and said, “look again.” 

I mean to say, nobody has ever been able to explain to me why something I care deeply for matters. I don’t know what the things I care deeply for “mean.” That’s why, I think, I read and write, or why the essay writes me. 

A good professor once told me to fail boldly, and that art does not answer the unanswerable, but instead, begs what is thought to be unaskable.  It might be suggested that I have taken their advice too extravagantly. 

I mean to say, I can only tell you why Kate Braverman matters to me. 

Because like me, like so many of us, she spent her whole life loving things as they disappeared, grieving things not yet dead, and now, she is dead. And what is left but to drink the sea? 

She is living posthumously: somewhere on the Santa Monica Pier, sitting with a pen by the Echo Park lake, the apartment in a tiny alleyway in Silverlake, somewhere on Sepulveda Boulevard. The street is 43 miles long. 

Braverman lived to corrupt the poem, and she lived to corrupt chronology and lineage, she lived to corrupt notions of class and home and gender landscape—on the line level, on the titular level, and beyond the text. I don’t think she lived for poems—even if she sometimes said so. I think rather, the existence of poetry enabled her existence. It allowed her to go on. 

She is living posthumously, and so are you. And so am I. 

*

Girl Pictures and Indulgent Nostalgia

I can’t remember the first I encountered Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, which is ironic for photographs so steeped in memory.  Like my memories of childhood, the photographs possess the duplicity of feeling safe and warm like folk tales, but also post-industrial, distant, and anonymous. The collection, spanning from 1997 to 2002, realises this duplicity largely through the wide array of young women navigating geographies largely absent from the real world. Who, or perhaps, what are they running from? The landscapes Kurland’s subjects find themselves range from Connecticut to Arizona, yet in spite of the wide array of locations, she seems to elicit the same sentiment from all of them. Indeed, across these photos are similar shocks of industry on bucolic locations: empty woodlands that back onto highways, gutted carcasses of cars, railway embankments, satellite stations, concrete enclaves repurposed into dwellings for the subjects in the photographs. In this world, Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t even have a grandmother, only a commune of girls who cook frogs under interstate bridges.

I grew up with a lot of media and text that gave treatment to the concept of ‘boys living in their own world’. The stuff I did read tended to be a lot of the bildungsroman, often boycentric, literature from Huck Finn to Catcher in the Rye to ‘Araby’. I wouldn’t have ever come across anything like Girl Pictures to even disregard it. So to now, all these years later, claim my memories of boyhood in the context of Girl Pictures–a collection that focuses on the story of communities of young women–feels wrong. If I wanted to perhaps see myself in a photograph, I would turn to Jamie Hawkesworth’s Preston Bus Station or Town to Town by Niall McDiarmid. My interest instead is rooted in the ‘in-between’ space Kurland’s landscapes occupy, the fringe areas of wilderness nestled between suburban and urban areas, both of which are always haunting the photographs somewhat. In this vein, I don’t see how the photographs could be described as pastoral; the threat of industry is too present, often serving as the ‘thing’ the girls seem to be running away from. Since the subjects in Girl Pictures are all in their mid-to-late teens, this ‘in-betweenness’ also elicits the pre-adolescent feeling of being lost between agency and passivity. In part, this is also thanks to how I see the camera functioning: at first glance, Kurland’s lens appears as a passive observer in these photographs, yet the sensation I get from recognizing how intimate they are leads it to suddenly become incredibly pointed, over and over again for every photograph I view.

Not all of Kurland’s photos are absent of men or boys. I say men or boys because our ability to differentiate the two is challenged by the photographs, and this ambivalence of either/or occupies some of the photos in a way that reminds us of how male presences generally, especially in the settings Kurland documents, have room to impose violence and power onto a situation that previously appeared platonically insular. It also nods to boy or girlhood being somewhat defined by what it's not, as well as the moment in which one realises how that binary often comes down to a physically occupied space. In an interview with Matt Paweski, Kurland stresses how important landscape was in engendering this, why it was important to create (in her words) a sense of liminality in the suburban locations she shot. “A lot of art and writing exists in that contradictory space where it’s impossible to be what you’re presuming to be. There’s no way there’s going to be a girl utopia or a teenage-girl-runaway commune in the woods,” she said. “It’s this impossibility, but to imagine it is to maybe get a little bit closer to it.”

It makes perfect sense now, but it wasn’t until years after I first discovered Girl Pictures that I discovered all the photos were orchestrated. Today, the lens I observe them through vacillates from a documentarian to a storytelling one. It seems both a bizarre and impossible practice now, but Kurland would pick up girls off the street, dress them accordingly, and drive them out to these remote locations in order for, in her own words, the camera to operate as a ‘container for building a world’. Yet as much as this world feels folkish and inspired to find community and utopia, it also feels Clintonian and pre-internet, the whiteness and lack of phones demonstrative of this. If Kurland was to take the photographs now, phoneless and made up of the same subjects, I’m not sure they would enjoy the freedom of vacillating between story and documentary. 

Do I apply the same logic to my stories that orchestrate themselves back into the past? What prevents the text I’m working with emit nothing but a potentially insidious sense of nostalgia? How can I prevent my stories replicate nothing but the mood of what I filmed on my family’s Sony Handycam, of Technicolor spaces that evasively skip between critiques? These are just some of the questions I have had to reckon with these photographs in mind. 

Kurland’s photos stick with me here in Tuscon because their point-of-view introduces a space that allows for something more than just nostalgia, a space where I leave with more question marks than periods. I imagine my first reaction to Kurland’s photographs was an indulgent nostalgia via emulsion film–but today, I am struck by their point of view, the orchestration; the lives and landscapes not being shown. 

Teddy Carolan, 10th April, 2023

In the Tiny Cabinet, I have included and responded to items that, for whatever reason, I took with me across the Atlantic from the UK. For those, you'll have to visit in person.

LETLEY WAS HERE.

I knew my aunt was brilliant. I knew she was generous and beautiful and incredible at cooking. I knew she was adventurous and opinionated and sharp as a fucking tack. And on some level too, I think I knew she was a survivor. 

“I’ll begin with a death / since that is where all secrets begin,” Lesley writes in an absolute banger of a poem that I found with her things after she died suddenly of a rare and aggressive cancer in December. In this notebook, I found pages of poems and short stories my aunt had written. They were beautiful. And until now, all of them, secret.

My whole life, I’d known my aunt to be an editor. Before my mom—a brilliant and, well, fiery person herself—pressed “send” on a particularly important (read: “you are wrong and here are the receipts to prove it. fix the issue immediately: I am not joking.”) email, she’d send it to her sister, the proofreader. Lesley would read and edit with machine-like precision and send back a ready-to-go draft that the devil himself wouldn’t be able to muster a response to. Neither Mama nor Lesley were really the confrontational type (my mom only if someone threatened her sister or her babies), but after a family gathering, the emails between the sisters would fly. You can call it passive aggressive if you want, but that doesn’t make the messages between them any less hilarious or any less true. (Mama, if you’re reading this, your password-making skills in the 90’s were subpar, but I really do love you all the more for it.)

Lesley was my mom’s best friend until I was born—then she was still my mom’s best friend, but Mama would just have to lie about it in front of me from time to time. I was okay with it. Honored, really, to come in such a close second to Les. Mine was the first and only birth Lesley ever witnessed. Hers was the first and only transition to death I'd witnessed. Mama was, of course, at the center of both of these life-altering experiences, holding onto both of us. Us three were soul bonded.

Mama and me, 1994.

 

I was in college when my parents divorced: it was fine. They loved each other for a long time, and then they weren’t happy together for a long time, and then they divorced, and there was nothing dramatic about it. I thought—probably because I was told by therapist after therapist—that even if I didn’t register it as such, my parents’ divorce affected me because my parents’ relationship was my first model of what love looks like. I would argue that my trauma probably came from assault or abuse or my multiple abortions, but therapists LOVE them a good divorce narrative.

 

                                                                                                    Lesley and me, 1995.

 

 

Aside from the fact that there are plenty of people who have children together and who don’t love each other, though, in my case this route was especially untrue. To be honest, I didn’t realize until just now—truly now, as I’m writing this—that I had the most beautiful, loyal, deep, unconditional, soul-bonding representation of love in front of me all along. Mama and Lesley, only two years apart, were best friends their whole lives. Lesley was another parent to me for my whole life, and even when she wasn’t fully involved in my personal life in my teenage years and beyond, never did her support of my mom waver. I always thought it was my mom who was the glue that kept us all together. In a lot of ways, she is. But I also never appreciated until now all the work that Lesley did to keep my mom healthy and alive and strong for us. 

I should’ve known Lesley had written all kinds of beautiful work of her own. I’ll never know another person who reads as much as she read. And she kept everything. Books. Notepads and sticky notes and scrap paper full of writing. Cut out recipes for chocolate cakes. Recipes for gratin potatoes. Her mother’s childhood photographs. Her father’s name tag from a high school reunion. Coins. Tacks. Scarves. A lock of her brother’s hair. She had the imagination and the material and the language to make a life writing. But she never pursued it. 

One of the things she left behind was a journal—one of those journals that asks you a question each day, and you fill out a different answer on the same day every year. April 4 asked: What do you regret? “That I’ve spent so much time at a job I hate doing things that aren’t meaningful to me,” answered Lesley in 2012. When she died, on December 9, 2022, Lesley was still at that same job, probably for a lot of reasons. She was a primary caregiver to both of her parents before they died, she was a deeply giving person who didn’t want to leave extra responsibility to her coworkers, and, I think, she was a survivor who was afraid of what quitting her job and having to reassess her life might mean for her and for those around her. Looking back, I should’ve known we would have this in common too. 

 

 

                                                                                    Me, covered in chocolate, 1995.

 

 

I dropped out of college the same year that Lesley wrote that answer in her journal. I didn’t have the strength to go back and finish until 2020. I never thought I’d graduate, much less make it into one of the most decorated MFA programs in the country. The fact that I’m even here writing this feels surreal, even now that I’m nearly a year into the program. 

I don’t know if I believe that we can heal our ancestors through our own bodies. I don’t know if my pursuit of a life as a writer can ease some of the pain or regret that Lesley felt about being stuck in aspects of her own life. But what I do know is that Lesley Glasgow Hall’s work is on display in the halls of the University of Arizona’s MFA program. What I do know is that, alongside the poems and stories in her secret writing folder, there was a single personal item: a card I wrote her in 1998 that says, “DAAR LES-/LEY I LOVE/YOU SO MU-/CH LOVE/JOSIE.” What I do know is that I wouldn’t have survived without her. 

 

 

 

On July 1, 2012, Lesley’s journal asked her what she wanted written on her tombstone, and Lesley answered: “LETLEY WAS HERE.”

A project I’m working on now is collaborating with Lesley. I am moving her words around on the page, adding spaces, deleting words—not to take away from her work, or to even critique or try to “better” it, but to have a conversation with her. I miss her. And I do think there’s a part of me that wants to give her the opportunity (the gift, the curse, the pain in the ass, the magnificence) of her work being torn apart in a workshop, or uplifted and believed in by other writers. To say to her: yes, you are a writer. Here, for example, is her poem “Night Watch,” which you can see like this in the Tiny Cabinet, untouched by me:

Night Watch 

I’ll begin with a death

since that is where all secrets begin

plants springing from dead leaves,

trees from charred earth,

my grandfather’s death. 

The first hour I sit with the body, I do not look—

no more than I would violate the privacy

of a sleeper on a bus.

The second hour I do nothing but look.

Strange how the hands of the dead hold their shape

while the face seeks its level, nameless as water

In the city, the mortician needs a photograph

to shape the cooling butter

back into the man.

Much later I hate how horizontal he is.

They should stand him up.

Do they think we would confuse him with the living?

Since no one is around I learn the marble of his skin,

Friendly like the arms of a comfortable chair

The mouth will not change its plastic smile.

Buy the fourth hour we are old friends,

now that conversation comes no easier,

and I can turn his face in my hands,

an old coin that buys nothing.

Toward dawn I leave my grandfather,

his secrets intact,

and turn to something I can get inside of

like rain.

Here is the version in which I talk with her:

Night Watch

The first hour I sit with the body, a sleeper

on a bus, I do not look—

The second hour I do nothing else.

How horizontal he is. As if upright 

we would confuse him with the living. His mouth 

that will not change. In the city, 

the mortician needs a photograph 

to shape the cooling butter 

back into a man. Strange 

how the hands of the dead hold 

while the face finds its destination, 

settles there, like water. His face, an old coin

that buys nothing. I’ll begin

with death since that is where all secrets 

begin: by dawn, his corpse and I are good friends. 

But when I leave, it is without him: memory and I 

both looking for something we can get inside of

like rain.

Daar Lesley, I love you so much. 

Daar Lesley, you are a writer. 

Daar Letley, you were here.

Love Josie.

                                                        Lesley and me looking into each other's eyes and smiling, 1994.