(Be)Side: A Meditation on the Parenthetical
But anyway, who wants a title? So claustrophobic, when I’d rather just float away in the parenthetical, or jump right in.
T. Fleischmann, Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through
It is difficult to determine where this project, the project of searching out and collecting parentheticals, began, where from the thought that carries it, has carried it, first emerged. Perhaps in Pasadena, California, where I lived from 2017 until the pointed head of 2022, as I gathered up my life for an intercontinental move, dividing the books from the kitchenware, Bourdieu from the teacup shaped like a cherub’s blonde head. Perhaps it began in Arles, in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of Southern France, inspired by the seemingly infinitesimal geographical delineations that couch themselves inside of each other. (I could, of course, continue in increasingly macro- and micro-directions, as it were, toward the Mediterranean on one end and toward the double-paned windows of my then-apartment which looked out onto Place Paul Doumer, onto Café de la Roquette, and the many little heads that bespeckled it on the other.)
“Perhaps my writing, here,” Bahar Orang notes of her own work in Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty, “is the articulation of a series of ruptures—all the times I appeared to be waiting but was actually searching.” Perhaps I began thinking and writing about the parenthetical to begin to think and write about the tendency toward and appreciation of rupture.
But perhaps I have failed to make my intentions entirely clear, so let me start again. What I am, of course, interested in is the parenthetical. I use this term in one sense to refer to a broad series of devices that allow the author of an aesthetic project to operate by way of excess, to present a form of thought untrimmed of its yellow fat. I use this term in another sense to refer to the excess embedded in our lives and in our living, the liminal moments of thought or action or substance that pock that which we consider the principal thread of our lived experience. As a poet and as an individual invested in a lived project of poetics, by which I mean that one’s lived experience cannot always be separated from the aesthetic event, I am not interested in cleanly dividing these two senses of the word.
Perhaps my interest in the parenthetical stems from this interest in excess, and, in particular, queer excess, the far-too-large earrings one could have gone without, the faux pearls or the frills, or, in some circles, and certainly in mine, the platform Crocs.
In his seminal monograph, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz responds to the parentheticals found in the closing stanza of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art.”
Bishop writes:
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some
realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of
losing’s not too hard to master though it may
look like (Write it!) like disaster.
For Muñoz, the parenthetical remarks embedded in the final stanza emphasize a shift in register and a turn toward a space and time of queer intimacy and excess. He notes, “I see these remarks, words that evoke the idea of gesture, as gesture…The parenthetical remarks communicate a queer trace, an ephemeral evidence.” The parenthetical of Muñoz’s analysis, thus, is a gestural residue that interrupts and shifts, that breaks from the mainstream of the principal remark to carry the reader to a bidirectional horizon, both ahead and behind, an unexpected and diachronic beyond. Taking Katie Kent’s advice to read with queerness as an expectation, Muñoz hypothesizes that the “you” of Bishop’s poem refers to her late and estranged Brazilian lover Lota de Macedo Soares, the “joking voice” and “loved gesture” therefore, too, belonging to said lover. “The parenthetical contains queer content,” Muñoz writes, “queer memory, a certain residue of lesbian love.”
This, residual, excessive nod to "queer memory," however, does not appear in the poem until several drafts in (there were seventeen in total). This imperative to "write it," snakes its way into the poem, first via a hand-written annotation (a note by the poet to herself), and then, later, is transposed into the poem in a number of succeeding iterations. In one, Bishop writes, "I wrote a lot of lies. It’s evident / the art of losing isn’t hard to master / with one exception. (Write it!) Write 'disaster.'” In another, she writes, “My losses haven’t been too hard to master / with this exception (Say it!) this disaster.” In any case, the author employs the parenthetical in order to facilitate the otherwise impossible affective turn, this impossibility lying not in the aesthetic act, of course, but in the very human instinct to resist certain emotional, social, or interpersonal truths. She reveals the complexity of her internal state, of loss, by making the annotation––and, therefore, the creative, as well as psychic, process––entirely transparent, and, in fact, indispensable to the poem. Here, the excessive, the over-explicative, becomes the driving force.
Muñoz's hypothesis that the parenthetical can both house and exist within a kind of residue, in the way a drop of a lover’s saliva can remain behind on the lip or in the way a bit of eyeliner can remain imprinted in the folds of an eyelid from a night out, is essential for my understanding of its make-up. The parenthetical is excessive, left-over, supplemental, and, therefore, not quite required. Among many other things, it offers a moment of existential liminality, one in which the author declares that the excessive morsel, leechingly attached, simultaneously does and does not belong, must formally be abandoned but is too dear for the completion of the task. It is in this way that it has come to my attention that I may be living my life from within multiple parentheses.
My thoughts tessellate and splinter, become like Russian nesting dolls, a thought inside of a thought inside of a thought, and, all the while, the chatter of the world meets up with my own–– the exteriority of color, light, heat, movement, and sound finding itself flush with the interiority of sensation, affect, assessment, judgment, and linguistic mud.
And inside of this chatter, I make an attempt at inserting parenthetical pockets (
) of silence.
Often, however, they insert themselves.
In 2013, while waiting at a bus stop in Santiago de Chile at roughly 1:00 in the morning, a white van speeds by, followed by seven or eight patrol cars, sirens blaring. As if by choreographic design, a band of police officers explodes from a nearby building, opening fire in the direction of the van, and in mine. I duck for cover under a bench and behind a bus stop advertisement (for L’Oreal, I seem to remember?) until it is over. Looking back, what most stands out are the small parentheses of silence the event is pocked with.
Something like:
( )gunshots( )gunshots( )gunshots( )gunshots( )gunshots( )gunshots( ) gunshots( )gunshots( )gunshots( )gunshots( )gunshots( )
And then, the van gone, the cops looking at each other, but not at me:
( laughter )
And later that same year (or perhaps before, time is fickle in that way) my friends and I unintentionally trespass onto a farmer’s property in La Serena while hitchhiking our way up North, and as we climb the fence to remove ourselves from the situation, and so as to avoid backtracking two or three miles, the farmer emerges from a lit doorway confronting us, pistol in hand. And it is only an hour or two later when I realize that I was the only one to have seen its yellow glint, my friends having all been fixated on the man’s eyes, or mouth (or maybe even the doorway, where a dog emerged, only briefly, before retreating back inside).
It is in this way that the parenthetical can act as a sort of illusion, or magician’s trick, allowing for a multiplicity of simultaneous events and forms, but always distracting the eye away from or toward the object in focus.
In Chris Marker’s 1962 science fiction featurette, La Jetée, the audience is introduced to the narrative through-line by way of a photomontage of black and white stills. We slowly learn, via optically printed photograph by photograph, of a post-apocalyptic Paris, of the protagonist’s imprisonment, of a society living underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries, and of their experiments in time travel, each aspect of the story dynamic, but unmoving. Then, 19 minutes and 47 seconds into the short film, the protagonist’s love interest, played by Hélène Châtelain, lying in a bed, opens her eyes in real time, as the film shifts, only for a moment, to a shot captured on a motion-picture camera. This brief, parenthesized instant, in a flash of true movie magic, creates in the film a rupture toward the intimate, simultaneously distracting and enhancing the gaze. It creates, in a sense, a shifting of tenses from the photographed archive of the single vantage past tense to a uniquely and intensely present moment, only to return, seconds later, to
the archive. It is, in fact, an opportunity to inhabit the elastic stretch of time (and to engage time’s occupants) with immense simultaneity.
Of course, as should be clear by now, when I refer to the parenthetical, I am referring not simply to that which is housed within that dually curved convention of punctuation that we refer to as the parenthesis, but also to a habit of thought, a tendency, a phenomenon, a gesture, and juncture that prioritizes excess beyond that which is considered pragmatic.
Let us take, for example, Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” which begins with the opening stanza
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travessera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
Here, O’Hara operates ecstatically by way of accretion and association, driving us toward the end of the poem by way of a series of sideroads. The anaphoric “partly because” allows the author to propose a sequence of tessellating asides, symptomatic, perhaps, of an undisciplined, hurried, wandering mind, which then become a central feature of the poem, offering at their core a sense of immense abundance and great love for the poem’s “you.” This ambling feature, though unwed to any specific punctuation, much less to the parenthetical marks of my primary assessment, still offers what a formal parenthetical might, that is, an ecosystem of thought or engagement that prioritizes the emotional and affective result in lieu of overly traditional formal or rhetorical structures, strictures, and constraints.
Despite my best un-studied guesses (that the word parenthesis is somehow related to the parental––one thought giving way to an eternally splintering family tree of metadata), I do not discover until quite late into my obsessing over the topic that the etymology of parenthesis, in fact, contains, in the Greek, and then in the late Latin, the simple sense of “putting in beside.”
"The irreducibly spatial positionality of beside," as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds us in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, and Performativity, "seems to offer some useful resistance to the ease with which beneath and beyond turn from spatial descriptors into implicit narratives of, respectively, origin and telos." So, while other prepositional markers seem to offer some sort of hierarchical or hierarchizing spatial directionality, moral imperative, or perhaps even an underlying communiqué as to the "whyness" of a specific cultural or social form, beside-ness, as communicated by way of the parenthetical, allows for a mere existence in parallel, or as Sedgwick puts it
a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking:
noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object...Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.
In this way, I am parenthesized next to my lover in our shared bed, as we sleep beside one another, the curvature of our bodies punctuating the space.
Like this: )(
And sometimes like this: ()
But most often like this: (( , I being greedy, and therefore forcing upon them my littlespoonédness.
And in this way, too, the pickpocket in Barcelona parenthesized himself next to me, the stealing of the phone from my back pocket (of course, ridiculous when I think of it now) lost in the shuffle created by the wrapping of his leg around my own like one might to a soccer pal, or to a lover, in the downpour of that late winter weekend.
The parenthetical, after all, has the potential to point to moments of great vulnerability.
In her poem, "You," alternatively titled "800," Hoa Nguyen writes
I cut the onions
You in the sun among the
multifarious faces that
open and color (flowers)
How can one move beyond
doubt?
Here, Nguyen illuminates the core of the metaphor by way of a plainspoken aside, the parenthetical “(flowers)” maintaining, thus, multiple functions. They invite the reader in, and, in a hushed voice, state “I have metaphorized this moment, but I am not sure yet of its success. I want it to be clear that I am speaking of flowers.” As such, Nguyen maps the flowers doubly, first in metaphor, “the multifarious faces that open and color,” and then by way of almost radically flat language, "(flowers)". Here, she is, in fact, opening a kitchen window through which we can peer in on her process, her moments of craft, of working and reworking the fairly spare content of her poetic production. Instead of posturing herself as a learned or impossibly competent writer, and her poetic work as complete and untarnished, Nguyen effectively communicates that the metaphor may have ultimately failed. She communicates an awareness of the ambiguity of the metaphor and of the reader’s presence before it, but also a stubborn unwillingness to abandon its formulation entirely.
Taylor Johnson, in their poem, “Pennsylvania Ave SE,” makes a similar move:
Bless the boys riding their bikes straight up, at midnight, touching, if only
briefly, holding, hands as they cross the light to Independence. Bless
them for from the side the one on the red bike looks like me his redbrown hair loose against the late summer static heat. The boy who is not me
(see how I did that) fixes his mouth to say something I will never hear I love you or I’m so sad though more than likely catch up.
In a moment of meta-analysis, “(see how I did that),” one that marks a sort of pride in the poet’s skillful application of the preceding device (in a fashion that is admittedly less self-conscious than Nguyen’s own addition), the speaker goes from looking like to, in fact, being the young boy on the bike. In this way, the speaker at once asserts a gendered positionality marked by boyishness and an orientation to a young, intimate, eternally vernal world. The commentary hidden away within the parentheses does the double-work to ensure that the reader does not miss this alchemical transformation from doppelgänger to self. The speaker announces that the poem is not simply about the boys nor the event that they are entangled up within nor the speaker’s own witnessing of the event, but, rather, that the poem is about the speaker themself. This pronouncement is echoed through and enhanced by way of the parenthetical, allowing it to compound and expand, perhaps in a way that marks Johnson’s own insecurity that the moment in the poem will be overlooked, but allows them to work with utmost transparency, inviting the reader into the collective project of meaning-making.
The world encases, operates by way of parentheses, makes meaning, stacks meaning, recontextualizes. The structures that comprise and sustain us are made intelligible, meaningful, by the ways in which they make contact with one another and by the ways they are held inside, or outside, one another in a wide expanse of mycelial relations. Rather than a rigid barrier between camps, this membrane-parenthetical allows for an osmotic relationship between interior and exterior frames, not only allowing, but necessitating the interrelationship of the pair.
As I make attempts at translating the Chilean poet Mara Rita’s Trópico mío into English, I cannot stop myself from seeing Rita’s premature death, just a year after the publication of her first book, parenthesized between each of the one hundred tercets that comprise the work. And, as I re-read Dictée, I struggle not to see a book dedicated to carefully examining centuries worth of gendered subjugation as somehow a parenthetical harbinger of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s own violent assault and murder just a week after publication.
Sometimes, certain ruptures in the world offer us––or force upon us––an alternative frame with which to understand the aesthetic event at hand.
(Perhaps my writing, here, is the articulation of a series of ruptures, Bahar Orang writes.)
In her Silueta series, which began in 1972, Ana Mendieta outlines an abstracted feminine form by way of a number of natural elements and simple materials. Bodies emerge from the earth in the form of flowers and flames, are carved into the earth and filled with blood. These suggestions of human geometry offer at once a lineage to a Pre-Columbian creative impulse and tradition as well as a direct nod to the Women’s Movement of her time and, given that each figure of the series seems to echo a chalk outline at a crime scene, to the violences experienced by women more globally. The bodies, one may presume, are Mendieta’s own, as well as the countless aggressed women she seeks to commune with.
How, then, to understand this series when Mendieta’s own body falls 33 stories from her Greenwich Village apartment, likely pushed by a lover, a man who is never held accountable? Her body parenthesized dozens of times by the earth, by rock and fire and water and blood in her oeuvre and then on the roof of a New York deli (only later to be parenthesized yet again by the earth).
"(flowers)" Hoa Nguyen writes, doubly naming the faces in her midst.
I suppose what I am writing about, hinting at, but not quite saying, are the alternating forces of rupture and absence (both with their own affective, aesthetic, psychic textures) that occupy the parenthetical. The parenthetical highlights these two camps, bringing them to the fore. Such is the case when, in her essay, "The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure," Solmaz Sharif attempts to decipher a letter written in Farsi by a late uncle who has died in the US occupation of Iran. Not quite proficient in the language, and struggling to understand, Sharif enlists the help of a friend in translating the word, "myn." She writes, "[I]n the middle [of] what I could not access–his fear, his longing for home, his food cravings and jokes–a mine appeared, right in fraught space between us." In the absence of her uncle, a mine ruptures the field. There are moments when the parenthetical, allowing a rupture, scrubs the surface of that which we believe to be intelligible, legible, or accessible, to reveal a palimpsest, a moment of obliteration.
In a similar way, the impact one may derive from Anne Carson's translation of Sappho, If Not, Winter, freckled throughout with empty brackets, rests primarily, one may argue, in the bracketed unseen––that which has been lost to literary history––and, rests, only secondarily, in the language, imagery, sound, and text held therewithin. Skrikanth Reddy, commenting on his book, Voyager, an erasure of Kurt Waldheim's memoir recounts, "I then deleted language from the book, like a government censor blacking out words in a letter from an internal dissident." And Solmaz Sharif, reflecting on the first time she encountered erasure as a poetic device, notes, "I know I thought of erasure as what a state does."
These processes of erasure and blacking out, as engaged by the poet, by the censor, by the ruthless passing of time, and, by, in some cases, the genocidal impulse toward eradication and disarticulation of the marginal and politically dissident, create in their midst parenthetical forms, gestures, and tensions of their own that reach out and back, that call for the reincorporation of the lost word.
Sonia Fernández Pan, in an essay on rupture, escape, flight, and the fugue– a contrapuntal compositional technique in music––notes,
Como siempre que escribo, hay muchas cosas que se quedan fuera del texto. O bien porque el texto las rehuye o porque ellas rehuyen el texto. A veces son ideas a medio elaborar; otras son referentes que se quedan colgando en los márgenes o entre líneas; algunas son impresiones que ni siquiera llego a materializar con palabras. Me acompañan mientras escribo, pero no llegan a aparecer del todo. O yo, sin darme cuenta, no les doy la oportunidad de hacerlo. Y entonces pienso en que esto es algo que le sucede a todas aquellas personas que escriben y cada texto que existe sólo cuenta una parte de lo que ese texto realmente contiene [1].
The part of the text contained within the text that does not explicitly appear within the text is also a kind of parenthetical. What I'm trying say with this final point is that there is so much I have not said in this essay––that the residue of history underpins, informs, operates within all that has successfully made it to the page, to the rooms where I wrote this essay. In my own process of converting thought into text, into language, I cannot ignore that which I have simultaneously obliterated, the spaces I have unintentionally carved from the great history of thought and text and language. Like many others, I am attempting toward a book now––a book being one such parenthetical, among many, a pocket in life, its binding placing its contents beside the living––and surely, some space in the world has become thinner, is stripped bare, because of these efforts. I hope that in this text you can see that residue as well. I hope you can see the garden of all that which has made it in, and all that which has not. After all, this essay is ultimately about the (flowers).
[1] "As always when I write, there are many things that remain outside the text. Either because the text shies away from them or because they shy away from the text. Sometimes they are half-baked ideas; at other times they are examples which remain hanging in the margins or between lines; some are impressions that do not even materialize with words. They accompany me while I write, but do not quite appear. Or I, without realizing it, do not give them the opportunity to do so. And then I think that this is something that happens to all those who write and that every text that exists only tells a part of what that text really contains (Author's translation)."
Day Heisinger-Nixon is a poet, essayist, interpreter, and translator based in Berlin. Their essays and poetry have appeared in Apogee Journal, Peach Mag, Boston Review, Foglifter, Nat. Brut, and elsewhere. Their debut poetry collection ROOM | ROOM | ROOM, winner of the 2024 Other Futures Award, is set for publication with Futurepoem in 2026.