I wrote to you on Wednesday about a specific moment of haunting marginalia, how I stalked in shaky handwriting the margins of a late scene in Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World.
I’ve never been a pristine reader, nor a pristine keeper of books. My home library is full of texts with bent pages and scratchy underlines, colorful conversations in my own expletive- and emoji-laced language happening alongside the author’s narrative turn, the poet’s surprise volta. It excites me when other writers talk about their marginalia. Johanna Hedva has spoken before of how they can track the shifts in their own life by pulling books off their shelves and retracing the steps of their handwriting among the pages. Hedva also mobilizes margin notes for “real writing,” as in this favorite graf from their review of Benjamin Moser’s Susan Sontag biography:
I started to make notes in the margins whenever Moser’s authorial voice gracelessly intruded on the subject, but again, without an accounting of his own position. I noted, ‘BM being a touch nationalistic,’ ‘BM trying to explain racism lol.’ There are also sweeping generalisations that feel thin and unsatisfying. ‘But Sontag had a sense for which way the cultural winds were blowing; and by the end of the 1970s, as its earliest, most urgent goals were achieved, feminism had lost a certain momentum.’ In the margin here, I wrote, ‘had it, BM?’
Edgar Allan Poe, who shares my birthday, my proclivities for doom, as well as my belief that “constraint fosters creativity,” also celebrated marginalia, according to Maria Popova, as “a playground for ideas and intellectual discourse.” Popova details Poe’s launch of a “Marginalia” column for The Democratic Review in 1844. In the first installment, he lauds a reader’s marginal notations as “deliberately penciled.” Poe continues, “In the marginalia, too, we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly — boldly — originally — with abandonment — without conceit…”
Matte Robinson’s scholarly book The Astral H.D.: Occult and Religious Sources and Contexts for H.D.’s Poetry and Prose delivers a vision of H.D. talking to herself—deliberately, boldly, without conceit—about her occult beliefs, practices, and relationships in the margins of the texts that inspired her esoteric seeking. Robinson spent years of archival research seeking out H.D.’s marginalia, in particular, to better situate her later prose and poetry, more broadly, within their proper kabbalistic, astrological, spiritualist, and tarot contexts. In doing so, he not only underscores the role of the occult in H.D.’s work, but also its role in her conception of herself, her dreams, her relationships, the world around her.