In her wonderful novel Flights, Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk takes aim at obsessions.
The novel inhabits many forms—there are several essays in fragments, as well as segments in traditional story arcs blending together fiction and non-fiction into a slurry of competing genres.
There is a short section early in the book that I often assign to my students as a guide for paying attention. In it, Olga describes a syndrome she claims she is afflicted with when travelling, one that has an effect on her writing—recurrent detoxification syndrome. The symptoms of this syndrome include a tendency to repeatedly seek out and return to certain images. This ailment, she claims, can be “easily found in any atlas of clinical syndromes,” though it seems to be a term borrowed from literature on substance abuse, one adapted to her impulses as a tourist and a writer. The syndrome also describes the way Flights is composed:
“A syndrome is small, portable, not weighed down by theory, episodic.”
Olga’s recurrent detoxification syndrome revolves around things that are “spoiled, flawed, defective, broken.” She prefers to visit cabinets of curiosity over sterile art museums. She likes to see broken bones, the preserved remains of stillborn conjoined twins. It is in these cabinets that she finds “the rare, the unique, the bizarre, the freakish.”
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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the 1990s. Perhaps I’m getting to that point in life when nostalgia for my teen years replaces the dull monotony of adult experience. Maybe it’s the sudden resurgence of 1990s fashion among my students that has the decade top of mind. Or perhaps I’m beginning to leverage the 1990s as a gritty alternative to the sheen of the contemporary now.
While the news is full of war reportage, coverage of trials involving corrupt politicians, and in-depth dives into the devastation of climate change, the city I live in seems to be getting a facelift. Long gone are most of the anarchist flags on the Spui. Bye-bye to hallowed cultural institutions and hello to the defunding of the arts in favor of barcades and bars with shiny surfaces. Electric bikes are everywhere, whizzing along carrying headphone-wearing zombies who ding on their phones rather than looking at the road. Botox lips and yoga pants. Dudes wearing overtly fascist haircuts, sharp against the soft silhouette of Gymshark sweatpants and hoodies. Disappearing are the cafes serving second-wave coffee with a little cookie on the side, places covered in posters of local acts playing to small crowds. In their place, sparsely decorated third-wave coffee shops with white walls, glistening machines, and coffees that cost €5 a pop.
I sound old. Kinda out of touch, maybe. But this isn’t a then versus now thing. This is about, like Olga, looking for the rare, the unique, the freakish. Where is it? Where has it gone? Is it a good thing when it disappears? Or is it something worth seeking after?
What I still love about living in Amsterdam is its small resistance to these changes, how the little details and history (for better or worse) persist. The beautiful cornices on certain buildings downtown that hide small statues of playful imps from pagan times. The rose bushes grown to incredible heights in the Jordaan, plants that have survived the people who planted them. The perceived chaos at busy intersections in the city, the way bikes and cars and mopeds all vie for first the moment the light turns, and how this chaos slowly unfurls into a freakish logic when stared at long enough.
Perhaps what I’m nostalgic for is more space for uncertainty. For surprise. For answers that arise from somewhere other than a boolean search. A different kind of uncertainty than the anxiety of always being on, always connected, always distracted, always “knowing”.
Back to my class: The assignment I give my students, along with Olga’s text on her curious syndrome, is to write down what they themselves find rare, unique, and bizarre. Many of my students have little to say on the subject. They don’t know. But it’s in that uncertainty that possibility arises. That’s where I tell them to start. And as scary as it might be, I tell them to turn off the phone, to leave it at home, and to go out into the world and get lost searching for this thing of unpolished wonder.
Honing House has a few upcoming classes before the summer that I’d love for you to join. Click the links below to find a full description of the course. Our fall agenda will be announced in late June!
May 27 — Two-Week Class: Revising Your Prose
June 4 — Four-Week Course: Make It Short—A Flash Fiction Class
July 9 — Introduction to Fiction Writing—Seven-Week Summer Course