CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Bruce Crown

Rappahannock Review Nonfiction Editors: This piece seems to play off life’s contradictions, whether that is the one between connection and disconnection, capitalism and socialism, or clarity and blurriness. What contradiction is most important to understanding this piece?

Bruce Crown: It’s a mistake to try and understand the piece in terms of which of the contradictions and paradoxes are most or least important. That would be a limited way to write or read something. It’s about experiences and moments captured and recaptured by pursuing apparitions that you may know exist but no one has seen.That sounds rather obnoxious. If we were sitting face-to-face for this interview, I’d chuckle and wink as I say this and wave it off.

I have found experiences to be naturally contradictory; you love someone but are unsure if they love you with the same depth; someone loves you and you don’t know if your love matches theirs; you want to be at ease with yourself and want those you care about to be at ease, but society has made our civilization a zero-sum game.

And these experiences become memories, and memories tend to loosen the bonds between people, and those events take their own shape, whether good or bad. I suppose the things that happened after my sojourn coloured that year in Amsterdam better and better—never having fully acknowledged that the immortality of youth had been embracing me the entire time, and now, as I’m thinking about how to best answer this, I’m flicked on the forehead by one of the most famous scenes in Dante’s Inferno, where Dante encounters Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta in the Circle of Lust in Canto V, and she tells Dante that she is still living in the memory of happier times. It’s a vivid scene, but the clarity of this love which echoes their past happiness slowly blurs the sequence, and moves Dante so much that he faints. The gap then, between Dante the Poet, who damned these lovers to hell in the first place, contradicts Dante the Character, who is overcome by his compassion for this genuine love wanting to relive in the memory of particular shared moments where they were happier. But that moment is gone, and all they have is the apparition of elation in their shared dreamscape.

In a way then, the pursuit of “clarity” becomes being able to exist within blurriness, within ambiguity like this; life is prosaic and grey and our mind shades in all the hues between;we are forever seeking connection with someone else. And there’s a tension in thinking along these systems: connection and disconnection, capitalism and socialism, desire and indifference, etc, a tension that betrays a motivation to just experience one moment that means something to one person but may mean nothing to another. And that’s a contradiction we just have to live with.

RR: We noticed there is this motif of ghosts. Even before meeting Klara, you describe how she feels like a spirit, “The docent feels like a spirit, a phantasmagoria of what it means to exist within art…  they seem to survive everything, including tradition and artistic fads.” What drew you to incorporate them into the piece?

BC: We leave pieces of ourselves in the places we’ve travelled, and those fading memories become ghosts of who we used to be. Usually, the best moments are moments where we find a piece of ourselves somewhere we never left it. These moments untangle something in us that we may have never been aware of before. This can happen anywhere, and it’s jarring when it does happen. I’d visited Amsterdam many times as a “tourist” prior, but on that particular trip, which was for research for my third novel featuring a grieving art professor, and even though malaise and a feeling of restlessness filled me and nothing “noteworthy” had happened until the moment I showed up to the Ceylan screening, I thought about how alike and fleeting a lot of experiences were becoming. Every conversation I overheard followed the same cadence, themes, and subject matters. I grew tired of this and had never realized how much I had relied on reading and watching football (which I was taking a break from during that time for a bit) to find stillness. In searching for those pieces of myself, I also frequented the Taschen boutique on P.C. Hooftstraat and used to sit on a couch they had set up and read art books. I had also bought a book on ancient religions, so I was reading a lot about spirits, deities, and apparitions. I wandered in those mental forests, looking for the Orisha (from the Yoruba religion), the Yōkai (from Japanese philosophy and culture), and the Yazatas from the Zoroastrians and Persian philosophy; looking back now, I suppose it was no wonder that ghosts, apparitions, and dreams of them made their way into my experiences. Your mind shapes your reality.

RR: Your inclusion of dreams evokes feelings of incoherence and blurriness. Why was it important for you to end the piece on this motif? 

BC: Endings don’t interest me as much as beginnings do. Where you end is the culmination of the work you’ve put in at the beginning. So the awakening of the dream is waking into a life you wish you had lived. When I look back at who I was then, what I was doing, how I was writing, who I was prioritizing in my life, most of it felt like the beginning of a dream. And of course we all dream, but I don’t think we dream equally. Some dream by night in the recesses of their minds and awaken to find they were merely asleep, but those who dream during the day are far more interesting they act out their dreams with open eyes and try to live them. I could never really grasp which I was. And as much as I try not to, I related, and in a way still do, to myself through dreams and memories. There’s a beautiful concept in Taoist philosophy, that the person that we are consists of our dreams and memories; we aren’t who we are now but who we were, and so this past you is more the real you than who you are now. What we are seems as ephemeral and intangible as a dream, but what we were is final and is a better predictor for who we will be in the future. So we start thinking and identifying ourselves with a person that no longer exists, rather than the person we are at this moment. Perhaps the incoherence present in a lot of our lives and this blurriness with how things are going echo our past reflections and dreams, so we identify more with a person that no longer exists; hence why we have trouble finding ourselves.

RR: You mentioned in your cover letter how Nescio served as an influential figure for this piece. The title draws from his concept of The Valley of Obligations, which describes a barren valley filled with people who are weighed down by their capitalist-driven desires. How did this play a role in your description of Amsterdam and of people? 

BC: The Valley of Obligations (Het Dal der Plichten in Dutch), is quite short. I remember it being less than a hundred and fifty words; I came across a copy of Nescio’s works in the Oudemanhuispoort book market near the university. What beguiled me was that in Dutch, plichten, which sounds like plight, actually means obligation/duty, but its suffix can take on many different forms: verplicht, for example, can be used to mean something that is mandatory, so when I thought about it, this valley of “plight” was simultaneously someone performing their own life out of a sense of duty or obligation while also meaning that living in that valley was mandatory; you were obligated to live. It remains quite overwhelming to think about.

So the piece starts with the poet overlooking this valley of people existing in transience and looking down at their feet, occasionally looking up and screaming and dying without their numbers decreasing, but then suddenly the turn happens and he’s in this barren valley, without any of the wonder of the world (flowers, trees, etc), and he howls like a dog in the night.

Written in 1922, I couldn’t stop thinking that even lifetimes ago, they were seduced into thinking that if something does not generate profit it is without value. I stood there looking at this page for a long time, and translation apps weren’t as good as they are now, so I had to ask someone who spoke Dutch to tell me about the piece and why it was so vital to Nescio’s authorship.

Similar to everything else, what stayed with me from that conversation wasn’t the answer they gave about the piece, but that the person told me that van Gogh sometimes bought books in the same market we were standing in, but because he was poor and never had any money, he would pay with portraits of the vendors or passersby and exchange them for books. I remain skeptical of this information. It’s a nice thought, though.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t call Amsterdammers as particularly capitalistic, more or less than any other country, even though the Bank of Amsterdam, the forerunner to the vapid modern banking system, and the Dutch East India Company, which exists in a long list of imperial endeavours that brought horror and terror to everything it touched, were both founded in the Netherlands, and both existed to make a few noblemen richer than they were. I see them as the course of our history in the systems we’ve built and protected. In the end making the rich richer was all that mattered then; time has moved forward a hundred and three years since it was written, but nothing has really changed; we are all looking at that valley and in it now, except now the valley is just AI data centres, exploitative “disrupters” or whatever they’re calling themselves now, advocating for deregulation as our brains rot while corporate forces and their boards control our political systems and dictate policies.

I’m unsure how much has changed since I was in Amsterdam, but I had also read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in school prior, and remember thinking about Nietzsche’s “Last Man.” This is a passive nihilist who seeks comfort, little pleasures or dopamine hits and is content with mediocrity; I’m simplifying it of course, but this archetype then abandons greatness, risk, and creativity. And when all dreams look alike: to become rich enough to live with ease and retire, to hustle and succeed and become one of these exploitative “leaders,” to impress, etc, it marks an end of aspiration and creativity, which is really the end of creation, longing, love, desire to be. So on some level, it was these desires and thoughts that informed the descriptions of the city and the people and those contradictions we spoke about earlier.

RR: We deal with a lot of early nonfiction writers. How do you, as an essayist, know when a fleeting moment is worth capturing? What, to you, made the moments present in this piece worth capturing? 

BC: When moments are silent, and your heartbeat is in sync with the world. Have you ever felt this? It’s as if those apparitions we are talking about are present with you, guiding you, whispering to you: ‘hey listen here, look there, something is about to happen.’ But then they vanish.

The high drama of a life-altering moment is quite often low-key. They occur so quietly, in direct opposition to the spectacles and fanfare and triumphant announcements we’ve come to value in the world. These moments are so still that when the experience happens, they’re not even noticed, like a dream in flight. When everything around you stills, and when the world falls quiet, that’s a surefire sign that the moment is special. I don’t want to be misunderstood here, because mundane moments and experiences are also worthy of capture, that’s what living is, but there is something about moments that seem to elevate themselves above every other moment. The poignancy here is that months or years may pass without a moment like this, and you feel like you’re in that valley rather than above it looking in, existing in passive and grey transience, and you have moments of doubt where you think this is your life now, the same routine again and again and again without all the colours you’ve come to love, and the moments worth capturing past the mundane are gone. The key is to be patient; I’m speaking from experience; I can count on one hand experiences like the one at the threshold of the exhibit. I waited six years once, until this past October, for a moment like that. It’s a bit like the curse of the wandering Aengus, and it may drive you mad, but it doesn’t, or hasn’t yet at least. Besides, if you’re never at risk of going mad, what would be the point?

RR: Most of your published work is fiction that draws from philosophical thought. How is the craft of nonfiction different, and how do you approach writing in different genres?

BC: Another obnoxious answer with a chuckle; the “craft” of writing is the same no matter the genre: you sit with your notebook and die a little. Fiction and nonfiction are not dissimilar to me. We bend reality to tell a fictional story and we try to capture moments or facts in nonfiction, but there are truths in fiction and memory colours our experiences in nonfiction. Of course, I would say motifs, symbols, or allegories in nonfiction play a more comprehensive role, because their analysis has to be sincere. Peter Matthiessen’s search for the snow leopard for example, is as much an internal search about finding your place in a chaotic world while being a travel journal about two rare-minded naturalist friends hoping to glimpse a rare and majestic cat in the Himalayan mountains, as Bolaño’s Savage Detectives is about two friends chasing and “detecting” and dissecting poems we never get to read while also being about two poets travelling the world hoping to find another poet who hasn’t been seen in decades. J.A. Baker lying down for hours on end to get a glimpse of a peregrine falcon is as much about patience as The Count of Monte Cristo. The genres are different, the way we read them is different, but the craft is the same. This betrays my ignorance; I haven’t figured out the differences myself. What I do, at least, is write and chronicle. When someone around me, whether a stranger or a friend or a lover says something that sparks an emotion in me, this can be something funny, obscure, controversial, lovely, conceptual… it doesn’t matter; I write it down in my notebook, and I read it again in their voice in the loneliness of my studio, attempting to trace their thought, and always thinking how lovely it must be to say such wonderful things. I’m quite lucky because I’m surrounded by people who say and do wonderful things that feed my curiosity.

But to answer your question pragmatically, fiction is mostly external: location research, historical research, cultural context, background, understanding the people in your work and their motivations, their drives. Nonfiction is internal: there is seldom any “research” beforehand and often very little background information, because it’s your perception turned inward about external events or experiences. So instead of location-scouting or understanding people’s motivations, you get your own— often skewed perception and reflection—about people and you may never understand why they do what they do. This is okay in nonfiction but it’s a cardinal sin in fiction.

I also find an element of finality in fiction. Things have to make sense, at least a little, whereas with nonfiction, especially travel memoirs or personal essays, ambiguity is forgiven, almost preferred, since readers seemed to have internalized life being stranger than fiction and relate to the idea that an experience can end even with “plot holes” and without all issues or contradictions being directly resolved or resolving themselves.

RR: What areas of philosophy are you hoping to dive into more in future pieces?

BC: My next finished novel is about the tension between consciousness and the nature of identity and the technocracy, augmentation, and corporate influence of everything around us, including the hierarchy of our desires and thoughts. It’s about a Danish ballerina who lives in a dystopia where corporations rule the world—it’s fiction mind you—with her fiancée as the onslaught of A.I. and personal-assistant-automatons threaten the idea of the self and what it means to be human and have memories and desires past technological and material “advancement.” Think Philip K. Dick meets William Gibson meets Issac Asimov meets Ursula K. Le Guin and they all sit down with Marcel Proust and Sylvia Plath, who are already in conversation about art and ennui and malaise. 

I’m also working on a novel and reading a lot about Manichaeism—dualistic cosmology within ethical framing interests me, and a lot about the philosophy of desire and love, and epistemology and the philosophy of language, themes that I have been grappling with for years.

It will be difficult to reconcile some of these ideas and mold them; I am struggling, and I know this is not a unique struggle; we live in a post-truth world where those are tasked with creating policy and running nations can distort facts to appease their corporate overlords, and so the idea of truth and desire and love appear as distant stars in a darkening horizon.

Rereading the Analects for this narrative to build a foundation for its world, there’s a despair and feeling of vertigo that grazes me, because Confucian ethics centers on the ideal of fully realizing your humanity, and moral cultivation and excellence are central to this. So the question I aspire to answer in the next (unfinished) work is: what is the difference between moral cultivation and moral convenience? And the reply cannot be one of despair, that’s why I only let it graze me, and only then to understand it, because anything more would be a failure for future generations. I sit often with James Baldwin’s reply to Mavis Nicholson during an interview in the late eighties, in which Nicholson asks an aging Baldwin, “Are you still in despair about the world?”

And Baldwin replies with the moral clarity we should all aspire to, “I never have been in despair about the world. I’ve been enraged by it. I don’t think I’m in despair. I can’t afford despair. I can’t tell my nephew, my niece. You can’t tell the children there’s no hope.”