James McDonald

gary barwin: imagining imagining: essays on language, identity and infinity.

hamilton: wolsak & wynn, 2023. $22

With more than twenty-five books of poetry, fiction, and children’s writing to his credit, Gary Barwin’s latest, Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity & Infinity, is yet a new departure—a work of non-fiction—that continues Barwin’s ongoing exploration of how language both separates and connects us in its infinite web. This dual potential of language is subtly captured by the title (and the brilliant cover design by Kilby Smith-McGregor): the repetition—Imagining Imagining—looks like a reproduction of the same, a mirroring of identical terms, but instead creates a difference. At the most basic level, we sense—even if unconsciously—the grammatical distinction between a present participle and a gerund, but the larger implications of what “imagining imagining” means continue to tease and loop through the mind, as they do throughout these twenty-three personal essays.

Barwin insists that the imagination is a vital part of being human—he affirms Ursula K. Le Guin’s remark that it is more important than opposable thumbs—but in the face of an infinite universe and its absolute mysteries, he recognizes that it remains a limited tool: “I shouldn’t make the mistake of imagining that the limits of my imagination are the boundaries of existence.” Those boundaries are everywhere, not just at the unthinkable edges of the expanding or contracting universe but also, for example, in our connections with other people. Paraphrasing the poet Natalie Diaz, Barwin recognizes that “[y]ou can sympathize, you can find analogies in your own experience, but the particularity of their feeling in relation to [another person’s] identity, experience and the processes of their being are not something that you can actually feel.” There’s a gap, a gulf, that simply can’t be imagined away. Or rather, we can imagine we know how it feels to be another ipseity, but then we preclude the possibility of actually knowing them, albeit in a limited, fractured, if more truthful way. “Imagining imagining,” then, holds open the gap in which differences meet; it requires a step back to take in a wider view that includes even the frame one must look through in the first place. It implies an awareness, as these essays affirm, of processes and positionality; the present participle of “imagining imaging” makes present the noun-ish fact that we are always already imagining.

Fiction is often defined as a work of the imagination. We know, when we are reading fiction, that it is a work of the imagination. But the imagination is always at work, even when we are not reading fiction. What then? Or, as Barwin asks: “What is the actual world and what is our projection of it?” We have a tendency to conflate the two, make an identity of them, and when this happens, the imagination goes on producing and reproducing its pictures of reality, but as though it were asleep. It doesn’t know that it doesn’t know whether it is dreaming or not. In “Wide Asleep: Night Thoughts on Insomnia,” Barwin hilariously reimagines the parable of Chuang-tzu and the butterfly, underscoring that it is not so much an epistemological riddle as a fiction to remind us that life is strange, and encourages us, like Keats’s negative capability, to be open to mystery, uncertainty, and doubt. The following passage from “The Ghost of Two Eyes” is a good example of Barwin writing from contingency and uncertainty while continuing to imagine different lenses and frames of reality:

I was thinking about the stereoscope because I misread

a word in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and in Sebaldian

style, I realized how it was a good metaphor for the

past. Or for memory. History. Our two views: how we

saw something then, how we see it now. Or maybe,

how our view of the present is affected by the past.

We see the same image but from two different per-

spectives and it literally creates greater depth. This is

either a good thing or a kind of illusion where we are

tricked into thinking our view is closer to reality. Two

different views blended as if they were one, and we

lose the ability to see two distinct components.

Continual movement, shifting perspective, and alertness to possibility at every moment characterize Barwin’s formally inventive essays, several of which are accentuated by diagrams and doodles. Oh, and humour—I dare anyone to read this book and not laugh out loud. These pieces are woven from a polyphony of styles: conversational tones warmed by the coals of anecdote (“When I was a left-handed kid growing up in Ireland, we used fountain pens and I always smudged the letters as I wrote”), puns that turn into paeans to the alphabet (“letterforms, these mouth shapes [...] the inky music of looking”), some of the best ekphrastic poetry ever devoted to a logogram (the ampersand: “a miniature mother & child—the mother embracing her child, their conjunction”), and sustained and graceful reflections on cultural appropriation and the importance of forming cultural webs outside the mainstream (“John Coltrane was my Bar Mitzvah Teacher”).

These essays argue that two of the best communication technologies we have for nurturing cultural webs are the little magazine and the small press. Barwin is that rare writer who has published with both small presses (including his own serif of nottingham editions) and with Random House Canada, one of the largest publishing firms in the country. In “Other Happinesses: Magazines Are Good, Magazines are Very Good” he draws on his publishing experience to consider the cultural ramifications of small vs. large presses:

By having flourishing and varied arts and culture, we

are resistant to homogeneity, to being

reduced to being passive consumers of what is merely in the interests of

the powerful. [...] I think of that line from the Steve

Martin movie Father of the Bride, where they’re talk-

ing about getting a videographer, and the daughter

says, “Can’t we just pay very close attention?”

Big presses are like having an expensive videographer at your wedding. You’ll end up with a product that can be easily reproduced and distributed, but the smiles will be strained, scripted, and photoshopped to look like the smiles we’ve paid to see. So, to imagine the metaphor further, how do small presses pay very close attention? And attention to what, exactly? To anything and everything, Barwin suggests, as neither the plotlines nor the material design of the small press book are predetermined by profits: “Publishing in small press, I was able to set the work in a form that best suited it [...] When the numbers aren’t so big, publishers are able to take risks.” For Barwin, holding a small press book in one’s hand, entirely manufactured by another person’s hand, is a kind of handshake, and encourages attention: someone made this, someone set these words here, beside this messed-up drawing, for me to look at.

I can’t possibly go into all of the topics that Barwin explores in Imagining Imagining (bird anatomy, Hitler’s mustache, brokenness, the Hebrew alef-beit, stars, dogs, the body, exile, the palimpsest of memory, family), but each individual fascicle of Imagining Imagining engages in some way with the book’s three main themes: connection, communication, and hope. In “Writing as Rhizome,” Barwin describes his writing process as beginning without knowing anything, and going from there: “It really is the state in which I begin most of my writing. Also, how I fill out most of my tax returns.” He proceeds, then, by following the language. Start anywhere, he suggests, and by paying attention to wherever you are (the shapes and sounds of the letterforms as much as the polysemous meanings and histories of words, tropes, images etc.), you will make and find your connections, digressions, and detours along the way. Language, which Barwin refers to as “its own internet,” connects us to everything; but, like the internet, language can also separate us as “a tool of deception, suppression and silencing.” Still, without vilifying the internet (or big publishing houses), Barwin’s essays continue to find the radical hope in language, in writing from where you find yourself, in small presses and non-hierarchical cultural webs, and, not least, in the dignifying and disruptive functions of humour.