My fantasy is that every book has a place where its theme is enunciated as a reflection on its form. In Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall, that point comes around two-thirds of the way through, on pages 113-14 to be precise, where a question elicits an answer that is not quite the answer to the question that was asked, which leads to the framing of a new question that casts a raking light back on the first one, a light in which the question’s framing turns out to have been the questionable thing:
Are ghosts anomalous to the rule of life? They remind us that life is a compositional process, with seams and fissures between moments. The seams and fissures allow for ghosts to emerge—through the rage, regret, foreclosure, the infinite spoils of the soul of the living. If death is the rule, ghosts become the living. Do the living then become the anomaly?
I take it that what Shimoda here calls the “compositional process” of life is congruent with the compositional process by which his book was made. The search for answers leads mostly to fresh questions; memories collected on one occasion may be denied the next time; images resurface but can’t be interpreted. The publisher’s back copy calls The Grave on the Wall “a lyrical portrait of [Shimoda’s] paternal grandfather,” but I would have put it a little differently, and maybe too gingerly, at least for the purposes of hooking potential readers as good back copy should: I’d have called the book a poet’s attempt to compose a process by which to arrange the “seams of memory” into a meaningful pattern. In it, ghosts and the living, documents and dreams, actions and images—the grandfather was by profession a photographer—communicate freely, sometimes hard to distinguish, sometimes as different as noon and midnight. Thus the book is neither fiction nor exactly nonfiction (though Shimoda has evidently done extraordinary research) but another example of that elusive genre that, in writing a while back on Stephanie Young’s Ursula or University, I simply called poet’s prose—although Shimoda’s tone reminds me less of any poet I can think of than of W.G. Sebald, whom one should perhaps call a poet’s novelist. And what is it about poets and their grandparents anyway—ancestors so near yet so far? Eleni Sikelianos wrote in her 2014 book You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek), “We are all trying to find our grandmothers because we’re trying to find something out about the past and how it came to be there instead of here, there or here instead of us.” Finding the place where his grandfather, Midori Shimoda, had been imprisoned after Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, Brandon Shimoda writes, “the barracks, isolated and staged, manifested an alternative universe, one in which my desperation had been appeased. I had reduced the history of incarceration not only to Midori’s face, but to my desire to understand.” The implication is that the desire that fuels the effort to understand undermines its own fulfillment. The engaged imagination is one that questions the truth of what it thinks it knows. That’s a bitter knowledge, and this is a bitter book, as is only right for a book whose settings include, among others, Hiroshima, where Midori grew up, Fort Missoula in Montana, where he was interned, and the assisted living facility in North Carolina where he lived and died as an Alzheimer’s patient. But the bitterness is not only personal, and not only political—though it is certainly that—but metaphysical. This book imagines “a future in which only memorials remain. Then the future will be the memorial. To all that came before. The mounds and the holes will endure as enigmatic earthworks, expressing, exerting their code, for no audience, but for the people-less earth.”
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Brandon Shimoda, The Grave on the Wall, is published by City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2019.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.