On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

It seems fitting that my return to writing on this blog starts with a novel that is a reminder of how important it is to remember — or rather, to take the time to make sense of the memories that never quite leave us.

Shortly before finishing the novel, I began looking through my photography to edit a few images I had overlooked. I had taken about a year-long hiatus from any serious kind of photography, and it was a joy to return to the process of focusing on a single moment and trying to not only bring out the emotions packed into it, but also meld them with my impressions of the scene. It shed new light on how I felt about On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which is almost a novel written in verse, especially given Ocean Vuong will always be a poet at heart. You are given access to memories curated, sometimes side by side, sometimes superimposed with not only two but sometimes even four images at once. It reminded me a lot about The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, one of the key books from my senior year of high school that propelled me into a study of literature in college. The fact that both novels hold memories of the Vietnam war is a strange coincidence that resembles the many odd connections we find between the memories that surface from our adolescence. Through writing, photography, and other art forms, we try to employ some agency over our memories and dreams, which take residence in our minds through no voluntary action of our own:

“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

-Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

When people ask about the point of the humanities, and why anyone would even think about spending four years studying books by dead people instead of gaining practical skills, they fixate on the physical means of survival — ability to provide shelter, food, medicine, etc. This is in no way wrong, but it overlooks the more subtle challenge we face in adulthood of a more interior, existential means of survival — what value is there in having the comforts of a safe home and satisfying one’s ego in social hierarchies when you don’t know who you are, or where you come from? The advantages of being a white heterosexual male in America go beyond the material — those belonging to the majority do not face the tendency to strangle parts of our identities with our very own hands to conform. Such is the struggle of a gay, Vietnamese-American boy, writing to save himself and emerge intact, standing before the world beautiful as he is meant to be.

When you see memories not as strange phenomena that are to be ignored, but as parts of a consequential inner battle to preserve and be true to oneself, it’s easier to see the “point” of humanities, to spend hours writing and away from everyone else:

You asked me what it’s like to be a writer and I’m giving you a mess, I know. But it’s a mess, Ma — I’m not making this up. I made it down. That’s what writing is, after all the nonsense, getting down so low the world offers a merciful new angle, a larger vision made of small things, the lint suddenly a huge sheet of fog exactly the size of your eyeball. And you look through it and see the thick steam in the all-night bathhouse in Flushing, where someone reached out to me once, traced the trapped flute of my collarbone. I never saw that man’s face, only the gold-rimmed glasses floating in the fog. And then the feeling, the velvet heat of it, everywhere inside me.

Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?

What I take away from this novel is not some philosophical truth, but a desire to be more like Ocean Vuong. The novel is an experience of seeing the world through a poet’s eyes — his images linger: the way the trees rake the sky, the way his mother’s words are placed coldly, stone by stone, the way keyholes are commas, pauses before an entrance. The images hit home further for me because I went to college near Hartford, and have taken the same Amtraks and Greyhounds, feeling out of place not only because I was far from home but because of my skin. And yet, there were also moments that were beautiful:

It was Hartford. It was a cluster of light that pulsed with a force I never realized it possessed. Maybe it was because his breaths were so clear to me then, how I imagined the oxygen in his throat, his lungs, the bronchi and blood vessels expanding, how it moved through all the places I’ll never see, that I keep returning to this most basic measurement of life, even long after he’s gone.

I bought the book impulsively when I saw Ocean Vuong speak at the Asian American literature festival in DC, and more so than the reading, which was moving, I was stunned by his sensitivity to words, to the way they can be used to hurt one another as well as build them. Such is the sensibility of a poet, but he made it accessible purely through his demeanor, the way his gentle voice and seemingly delicate body held each word slightly before speaking it into existence. Writing to resolve inner voices and memories is a selfish task, as is the study of literature; after all, the primary beneficiary is oneself. But if discovering ourselves and the power of language can make us better human beings, then we gain the ability to inspire others to do the same.