American Dreamscapes: An Introduction to Lauren K. Watel''s Book of Potions By Ilya Kaminsky If in a thousand years an archeologist finds this collection, they might not know anything about our empire, its wars, American daily life, but they will learn quite a bit about our psyche, which is to say our dreamscapes. It is as if with this book of dreams--anxious, tender, angry, longing, funny, stand-offish, lyrical, incantatory, haunting, nightmarish--Lauren K. Watel has given us a kind of X-ray of our time, our country (with its horrific gun violence and its pretty suburban kitchens), its pulse. Now, let me be clear, this isn''t something that the reader might think right away, as they open Book of Potions . I didn''t, for sure, but as I turned the pages, this realization grew, and it became unstoppable. At first I marveled at the imagination, its reach. Here is a taste: "Out in the country the tree comes alight every night with fireflies, and the sky glows a cool blue, like a painting of loneliness, and the birds fly in from days gone by.
They land in the branches of the evening, singing of their darkening business." Then I found myself falling for the tonal shifts, for how tonally alive these pages are, their humor. Listen to this: "Meanwhile an angel appeared. A man angel, all clean-shaven and smelling of cigarettes, and he was wearing white robes, like angels do in movies. He seemed none too pleased about it, having to wear white robes.But there he was, on the corner of Stanton and Ludlow in his white robes and gleaming chin." This humor goes hand in hand with irony, of course. But the difference between Watel and many of her contemporaries is the fact that her irony always contains a metaphysical element.
In short, she might have the angst of a Seinfeld character, but the dark, soul-level torment of Gogol is not far behind. I wondered how one could live on a daily basis with that kind of biting metaphysical irony and get away with it. This is a relentless, bracingly honest accounting, with the occasional reprieve of jubilation: "when chords started up from the guitar, crashing through that battered amp, song that sounded like an uprising, loud and strident and brash, I could have died of it, the joy." What unites a collection comprising such different visions is the formidable uniformity of the speaker''s voice. Watel''s voice is unmistakably hers--driven, energetic, rhythmical, lyrical. It is a voice whose timbre also serves as a kind of self-portrait, for every image here is charged with tone, and its many self-revelations: "My hair, my skin, a map of experiments.over a half-century of wandering these sidewalks." As I turned the pages, I found myself more and more impressed at how revealing these dreams are, though in no way confessional.
One gets the person behind the page, without needing the biography. Here, a dream might often be a psychological portrait, or in reverse, a psychological portrait that might be a dream: "I was at the gallery alone. Now I saw it was because all my friends were there, in frames. No wonder they weren''t available when I called to invite them to the opening." As the book went on, I began to wonder: how is she going to pull it off, having so many pieces in the same form? Yes, the nerve of this book is formidable. "Go on the nerve alone," Frank O''Hara once suggested to us. Yes, imagination here is impressive, too. I think Borges might have found himself enjoying these pages quite a bit.
Yes, I loved the idea of a potion, which suggests an invention of form specifically for this very content, and a hybrid vision naturally requests a hybrid delivery. But how will the book sustain so much uniformity in its form, I wondered. Instead of giving in, Watel doubles down. Repetitions begin--and this is a brilliant move on her part, as what starts as a formal project becomes literally haunting. Thus, the incantations of "What Sounds"--as the title reappears through the book--haunts our auditory organ, expanding our idea of what sounds, resounding, resonant, echoing, can be. We learn on one page that "What sounds like rain is tires on asphalt. What sounds like sunlight is death in the trees." And some pages later: "What sounds like music is the insect approach of twilight.
" And, further on: "What sounds like silence is anger. Look, over there, it''s your father and grandfather and their fathers and grandfathers and so on, lining up, arms akimbo, across a field." The repetitions of "In the White Room" deliver a striking punch. The question at the heart of these poems is, appropriately: "Where is everyone?" Food for thought in a book so crowded with everyone. As white rooms keep popping up, they bring this question into focus, and in the final white room we find this: "My hands clutch this notebook as if it were the hand of my father, dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was in a white room of his own. Or was it night in there? Hard to tell." This is where one realizes--and cannot escape this realization--that the white rooms of mental illness and gun violence haunt this sequence.
The imaginative scope and range of Book of Potions is marvelous. With so much tonal invention and play, not to mention grief, solitude, tenderness, angst and bravery, the book is truly a dreamscape: Watel has built a house with myriad rooms, each of them a dream that keeps spiraling. There is something reminiscent of Kafka''s parables in Watel''s perspective, something Calvinoesque and Borgesian and even Gogolian, yes. But in the end, I felt, the book has a peculiarly American metaphysics of the self, an isolated and estranged self constantly grappling with the larger forces. Out of this metaphysics a human voice begins to speak, and through speaking re-arranges the landscape as we know it.