Malinda Words: The mysteriously enjoined in the middle of nowhere

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 242nd article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

‘The middle of nowhere' is a phrase often used to describe what is perceived to be a location that has no meaning whatsoever. Nowhere, after all, vague though it is, always implies a 'somewhere' that makes sense. ‘The middle of nowhere,’ then, is positively godforsaken. It’s all metaphor of course and that's how I thought of it until Gary Larson made ‘Nowhere’ an actual place, something tangible, in his single panel comic 'The Far Side.'

It is an astounding piece of surrealistic art. He has a couple driving through what appears to be a desolate landscape with the passenger, a woman, holding a map with the legend ‘NOWHERE.’ They are passing a sign that says 'ENTERING THE MIDDLE.' The comment below, attributable to either of them, is hilarious as it is dark and foreboding: ‘Well, this is just going from bad to worse.’

Terrifying.

The middle. It’s not a place anyone wants to be or to stop at. People need to get from A to Z and that’s what they try, for all talk of it being about the journey and not the destination. The tyranny of extremity can take other forms. People go for broke: all or nothing. And just as we refuse to see the B, C, D and so on until W, X and Y, we willingly retire the eyes to see the charm and delight that possibly describe some of the innumerable ‘some things’ between all and nothing.

Well, a few hours ago, somewhere in the middle of New York City whose beginnings and ends are many and, fortunately unknown enough so I could name ‘middle’ at will and which I now announce, ‘Mcnally Jackson Books,’ serendipitously in the middle of a literary event, Colum McCann flipped, deconstructed and vegetated ‘The Middle of Nowhere.’

The event was an ‘end,’ literally. It was a discussion of the series ending collection of “Freeman’s,” a biannual of unpublished writing put together by writer and literary critic John Freeman, the former editor of Granta, featuring some of the contributors with John as moderator. The last word of "Freeman’s" was appropriately titled ‘Conclusions’ and it was necessarily and elegantly subverted. This was evident in the parts that were read and the responses of the authors to whom John posed questions which gently nudged them to speak at and to any place but the end, the conclusion, the destination.

Colum McCann

McCann, author of seven novels, three collections of stories and two works of non-fiction colluded with John, by picking a few specific lines to read from his short essay, again appropriately titled, ‘The beginning is today.’

‘And if the beginning and the end of any story - or indeed any life - are a conundrum, then the absolute mystery of things must be to find the pure middle of anything.’

He goes on to conclude (bad word), ‘[The] middle of any life, like the middle of any story, lies at an impossible point. We are all beautifully and mysteriously incomplete.’ Indeed, he insists that everything is a mystery which implies that nothing is fully known, but that kind of ignorance does not necessarily lead to despair. Colum offers the salve that has an empowering trace: ‘…it is this mystery that joins us together.’

When, after all, can anyone say in all honesty ‘there…done!’ unless terribly afflicted with ignorance or arrogance or both? A full stop interrupts the movement of blood along veins, the commerce of ideas, the will to imagine and reimagine. It signals the establishment of tyranny, the outlawing of poetry and the banishment of poets. Happily, the ellipsis is an accomplished truant that puts up signs with the single-word legend ‘nowhere’ in the middle of every asserted end, thereby surreptitiously renaming them, ‘Beginning.’

And so the poetry of this world is reborn and in turn rebirths the mysterious incompletes that help convince us of impossible truths in all the middles that are left unmarked on maps and therefore argued to be nonexistent.

John Freeman

Freeman, in a deft insurrectionary editorial move, positions ‘A short manifesto’ by Barry Lopez at the end to invite the reader to consider the proposition of the middle’s purity, its tantalising incompleteness and the unidentifiable and yet unmistakable solidarities that find residence there.

‘We need to discover that our grace resides in our generosity, and our wisdom in a greater courtesy toward the mystery that contains us.’

Larson’s clever cartoon at first glance is funny even as it reminds us of the dark regions of our predicament as individuals and as collectives. And yet it captures that very commonality of being contained within the mysterious.

There, in that nowhere which is the middle where poets and readers find each other and in each other, themselves, there is a sharing that’s touched by rare grace. That is the generosity of “Freeman’s” and all those who brought word-food to that common table since 2015. No one need starve and no one will. Not in the middle, if its mystery is recognised and duly watered with literature. And thus do we learn the true dimensions of ‘bad’ and ‘worse’ and most importantly that their existence does not banish ‘good’ and ‘better’ to the middles of the nowheres out there or within our hearts and minds.

12 October 2023

The mysteriously enjoined in the middle of nowhere

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