Provisional Necessity

Christian Wessels reviews Forrest Gander’s “Mojave Ghost.”

By Christian WesselsOctober 21, 2024

• Poetry

• Fiction

THE SCOPE OF GEOLOGIC time makes a poem’s time feel infinitesimal: a human shudder in one subdivision of billions of years. Embedded in a poem, the scale of geologic time countervails a present urgency made by form. Often, small, expressive moments repeat themselves, perhaps change in our memories as they repeat, so we return to the poem; geologic time deepens and will continue after these small, expressive moments are no longer available to us. Forrest Gander, a trained geologist, positions his new book Mojave Ghost (New Directions, 2024) between these two scales—or ways of measuring the human—as he asks, “But where / is the human place / in geologic time?” There is a scientific answer to this question, one available to those who want a scientific answer; Gander’s poem fashions the division between “human place” and “geologic time” as a kind of unity. The poem continues, “Is there / some quality in me that links I am / to the remainder?”—to the remainder, excess, ecosystemic waste and waste of the self, interconnected, “to whatever is / left over.” To answer the question of the “human place,” look to what’s been excluded; to answer this question, ask another: “What / in the world / have I left out of me?”

Perhaps more than with other poetry collections, it’s important to contextualize how Mojave Ghost came about. The author’s note that precedes the long poem explains how, after the death of C. D. Wright, the poet’s wife, and after the death of Gander’s mother, he “began to walk sections of the 800-mile San Andreas Fault, from north to south.” This travel, unwittingly it seems, turned into a pilgrimage to the place of the poet’s birth, the Mojave Desert. Stratified, present grief overlays the past. Gander continues: “Along the desert’s and my own fault lines, I found myself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating my emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions, the fractures and folds that underlie not only my country, but any self in its relationship with others.” These divisions are not exacted through comparison, and Mojave Ghost does not attempt to explain how they resonate off of each other. Instead, the poem establishes these divisions to position a self between them, someone who can cross “permeable dimensions of time and space” and record that crossing in sentences and lines.

Not just sentences and lines though, as Gander calls Mojave Ghost a “novel poem.” This framework begets the perspectival questions the long poem asks of itself: “Now, he finds there’s no way / to mind the gap between first- and third- / person perspectives.” The social impressions of life between people collude as one person—one “he”—encased in a poem, who crosses dimensions and divides. The “I” resists itself through “he”; “he” resists himself through “us” and “you”—or as Gander writes later, invoking the famous expression of Arthur Rimbaud’s, “It’s not that I is another, but that my life is always elsewhere” (emphasis mine). By positioning life elsewhere, it’s established as a proximity: “Life is not happening as this language forms a ‘he’; it has already happened, distant from the ‘I.’” As the scope of geologic time destabilizes the human place, the fact that “life is always elsewhere” is a temporal challenge. Life becomes life as a memory; otherwise, the poet is simply walking.

Rimbaud’s poem “Roman” starts with “On n’est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans.” In English, “Novel”: “No one is serious at seventeen.” The aging unserious become the prickly serious: the social conditions for one moment in life become a defense, almost, as if to create a memory through which the gestural novel can move. Mojave Ghost begins similarly:

Men arm themselves with facts.
They say, already reaching, Let me
see that. They ask, seriously, Who
is your second favorite tenor sax player
between ’63 and ’65?

Inflected with a kind of solemnity, these lines are funny and grim—the image of men, bravely intelligent, listing how much they know (or merely remember) about tenor sax players, so brave. Facts, for these men, are a method of self-determination, as “each / thinks the other is a bit emptier, more / cardboard than himself.” Who knows more than I know about sax players? And if they do know more than I know, their knowledge was not acquired as wholly as my knowledge. Is this not also a temporal question? My knowledge of the past gives me a self in the present, brilliant and better suited to this moment than other men. Except, because we are dealing with a novel poem, because Gander overlays the genres to create a moving ambivalence between the singular and the collective, other men are also just one person: “Only / I live the real real, he thinks. I think.” I am other men, but to write it this way begets a sincerity that does not evoke, at first, pride or humility. Rimbaud writes in the last section of “Novel,” “You are in love. Occupied until August. / You are in love.—Your sonnets make Her laugh.”

Occupied, the figure of Mojave Ghost—accumulated in “other men,” by “you” and by “I”—is also in love. And if not in love, it’s the concept of love that structures much of the book’s movement section by section: love of the self, love for the dead, love of the self in memories of the deceased. Because love is a figure for crossing, it becomes a way to prepare for death: “Because I gripped what I loved tightly, what / I’ve lived makes it easier for me to leave it behind / when my time comes,” Gander writes, as if the Mojave past is all a Stoic’s preparation for death. If only the conditions of our mortality could be encountered so gracefully, with so much certainty; the poem immediately turns, “Because I didn’t grip tightly enough—” Because I did, because I didn’t, the memory of degrees changes, continues to change—what could we have done differently?—and it’s the poem’s relationship to this instability that makes death a matter for preparation and an impossible terminus. No matter what “permeable dimensions” are crossed, or perhaps because the poem is a crossing, the Mojave is local. However love prepares one for death, its memory is striking and familiar: “We drive deeper into the desert, arguing / about whether it’s possible / to love without reservations.” No answers—the question itself determines its context. Is the implicit object for such love the other person, eros? Is this love a worldly possession? Deeper into the desert, closer to the source, as the two figures “stop for gas in Barstow, / where I was born,” and where a “boy offers to let you hold / the horned toad he is gently stroking / in the direction of its spines.” No answers, but crossings that express and deny these reservations: The image of the horned toad, extended, the boy waiting for a response.

The toad is a token; the poem animates the memory of that token in the present. Gander writes later in Mojave Ghost, “The tokens of love we exchange / don’t express love’s meaning so much / as its ineffability.” Say love is inexpressible, say that the cross-dimensional framework of this book makes the term even more unspeakable: the poem creates the feeling that, of course, we know how love functions here, in Mojave, but it takes the entire book to express that figurative knowledge. The long poem’s patterns, the deviations from that pattern, its cyclical return to memories, small inflections in those memories: each colludes to locate and change the other, and in this process an experience with ineffability is suspended. The section continues, “So my experience of you is infinite. Never / contained within your dimensions.” Just as this experience is at once contained to the poem, such experience becomes specific and new in our performance of these words—which does not mean that it becomes anything, but that it stays utterly itself. “You are the love of my life. / No. You are the love of your life.” Both statements are true.

Mojave Ghost breaches the containers it establishes for itself, and these small ruptures become the most moving parts of the book—the overlay of “you” and “I,” perspectival shifts embedded in the novel of memory, the ineffability of love. Though it feels inaccurate to refer to “perspectival shifts” when, really, the self is expressed as singular and collective, one changing through the other, as Gander imagines “marriage” as “a divination of resonant relations,” a Chaucerian flourish. Mojave Ghost builds an ecosystem of people and memories, places in time, expressions of love, as the various figures and objects can only live in the context of each other. They thrive when others thrive; they suffer when others suffer. And what of the memory this book creates of itself, its own performance?

But back at the start,
I was occupied
with myself as though I were
never to be a part. As if
I weren’t both in and of it. Of
what? So I hike the long
fault for some new
point of view, asking, muddled
with anxiety, what comes next.

From “Rift Zone,” the long poem’s coda, the “I” is refracted, and we are sent back to the beginning. To acknowledge one’s resistance to participate in and of the journey—yet to question what shapes that in and of—gives us a framework. “What // is left of experience that hasn’t / been measured?” This is a good question, like the question of the human place in geologic time, for those who want a scientific answer. Not to suggest a poem cannot provide such an answer: As “Rift Zone” reflects on what comes before that moment, as Mojave Ghost crosses and recrosses its self-made borders, a new kind of experience is being made and measured.