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Rivka Galchen: I was going to say that I couldn't remember where the idea for this story started, but then as I was thinking I couldn't remember, I remembered why I didn't want to remember: It was pregnancy. I had never felt like the captain of my body, but I had the sense of myself as a kind of first mate at least, and suddenly I was barely a deckhand, and the mutiny was so public. Now mutiny can be a good thing, of course. And there was nothing inherently bad, or inherently good, about the new physiology—it’s just essential—but it did heighten the experience women already have—maybe men too—that it makes sense to people to just talk to you about your body and tell you about it… that coupled with being seven, eight, even nine months pregnant and some people not even noticing… so I think that strange confluence of visibility and invisibility, and of private and public, led me back to the Gogol story. "The Nose"—in which a man's nose leaves his face and goes about town with airs of its own—literalizes metaphors and metonymies that made sense about the male official at the center of that story, and so I wondered how a story about a third breast—a story that was structurally akin, but with different chirality—would unfold. I so love your observation about what happens when we get flattened out into objects for other people, or when they flatten out for us—I feel like you've described there so well that strange shimmer that comes from our fantasies about ourselves bumping up against other peoples' fantasies about us. With this particular story, I found it making its way out to thinking that odd dance through finally in that simultaneously public and alien sphere of online comments.
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I hadn't thought of it that way, quite, but that's great, revealing. I think it's part of that perennial human comedy, that we have these bodies that are just out there: occupying space, getting hungry, falling asleep in public. I don't think it's uncommon to feel like a ghost haunting a very weird machine. And it doesn't really matter how much we read and come to understand that the mind is the body, that there's no sharp dualism, etc… but there's still the phenomena of how it feels, which is that the body is going around making a fool of us—the whole body is like that Gogol Nose, lording around town, embarrassing its owner. And I think when other people comment on our bodies, it exaggerates this basic feeling of that part of us which feels less personal—the body—being treated as more real by others than our inner lives, our minds, which is what seems more real and personal to us, more essential. It's as if other people's comments verify something not quite true, and yet maybe truer than we'd like to think… it's tricky, since the verifiers are themselves such weird bad scientists of a kind.
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Yes, yes, yes, yes. Or really: I think in a good "mystery" we find the key to the solution, and it really is the key, but then it turns out the key is also a keyhole, onto a much more vast mystery, one we are just barely perceiving, like light from the big bang. I would describe this as a preoccupation of mine, except that I think it's a preoccupation, unconsciously at least, for pretty much everyone. Even people who are drawn to certainties—doesn't all that declaiming with confidence sound like a fearful and childish little protest at the edge of a vast dark? I love, for example, the shape of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe. That's the Dupin story in which we are given a perfect, wholly understandable solution to the mystery of the murders of the two women—it was done by an Ourang-Ourang. That's mostly how the story lives in memory, for its monkey ending. But if you read it again, you get stuck on other aspects: What terrified everyone about the murder was not its violence but that it didn't seem to be motivated by money… and then you meet the poor sailor who was hoping to make some money by selling the Ourang-Ourang, a creature held captive, and the way the Ourang-Ourang came to have a razor blade was that it saw its human captor shaving in a mirror and wanted to do the same… the real mystery of the story basically expands out and out to trade, to capitalism, to French colonialism, even to rationality… there's this long, strange first half of the story before the murders even get discussed in which we find out how the narrator and Dupin sleep all day and are up all night, they almost seem like lovers, and Dupin's rational method of deduction, well, when he explains it to the narrator, it's such an over-the-top, ludicrous set of free associations that it almost seems like a joke on rationality… even as the power of the thinking is shown as well… so the story opens up onto all these much larger mysteries… Anyhow, I find that sort of shape very interesting and very worthwhile.Also, I often ask myself, Well, what is it that fiction is good at? In my family, who are not particularly readers, there would just be this very straightforward question again and again—why would I want to read something that's not literally true? Which, I mean, is a genuine question. And there are many subjects or experiences about which I would rather watch a documentary, or read a long article, or experience it firsthand—so what is it that fiction can do well? And I think that has something to do with these spaces that are not better illuminated in other ways, these murky places that don't yield much to other forms of investigation.Why do you think these murky places are the ones that draw you? What are you after?
I don't know, but I guess I lean into the not knowing and hope something turns up? For instance, I recently learned that Murk Monday was the term in Scotland for a great solar eclipse from 1652. That's not quite something, but it's almost something.Alternately: maybe aftermath.