Fractured Heavens: A Review of Janice Lee's The Sky Isn't Blue

Many would argue that the main goal of literature, like most other forms of art, is to entertain. After all, we’re frequently so bogged down with the stresses and struggles of real life that we rely on these creative efforts to generate enriched escapism in which we become and interact with drastically dissimilar people in wildly different worlds. While that’s all well and good, perhaps a greater purpose of literature is to give meaning to those very same hardships, to allow us to explore our (and others’) deepest desires, fears, and confessions in the most eloquent and relatable ways possible. In her newest collection, The Sky Isn’t Blue, Janice Lee does just that, proffering a plethora of unrestrained revelations and reservations that evoke a sense of fragility, bravery, and honesty akin to Joni Mitchell’s Blue or Kaufman and Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Although it can feel a bit self-indulgently opaque and artsy at times, there’s no denying the beauty and weight Lee pours into each examination of her innermost being.

Lee (who, among many other things, is the Executive Editor of Entropy, where “earlier versions” of several of these works first appeared) views these pieces as essays, yet they often feel more like prose poems, written in paragraphs yet packed with dense, lyrical phrasing and stream-of-consciousness structure. Either way, there isn’t a wasted chapter in the lot, and the vast majority of them will leave you speechless with empathy, wonder, and introspection as you follow her investigations into the connections we make to each other, the cosmos, and even ourselves.

The opening section, which appears before the first official selection, gives a good impression of both the style and substance Lee aims for with The Sky Isn’t Blue:

In every manner of space, there is an intimate and crucial rivalry between open and close, between time and memory, between myself and yourself. The further we walk together, the further we walk in parallel, that distance between us that wavers, minuscule on some days, and incredibly vast on others, but always and certainly there, that distance persists.

The entire sky between us.

The entire sky between us.

Arguably the most prevalent and impactful subject Lee touches upon in her anthology is the death of her mother several years ago. She writes about and to her mother regularly, as if to exorcise unspoken views and hold onto a bond that, in some ways, is still very much there. In “Backpacking, Point Reyes, Driving,” for instance, she ponders how this loss has affected her entire history and outlook:

I look back and see my life divided up into three periods. First, the period before my mother’s death: a past that is difficult to remember, almost a daydream, figments of another life with mountain ranges that separate my current self from all else that dwells back there. Then, a period of flatness and depression: utterly content and comfortable yet without happiness or joy. Then a period after an intense heartbreak. The details are extraneous. What matters is that I have trouble remembering anything from past periods of my life. As if they happened in other lifetimes, or not at all.

Elsewhere, she scatters smaller fragments of the same mourning within other contexts, such as in “Los Angeles,” where whimsical ruminations about the city lead her to the following conclusion: “The confession isn’t the desire for death, though there is that too, but that you miss your mother… But in the light there is mother, there is that untraceable wound that began with birth.” These excerpts demonstrate one of the greatest feats of The Sky Isn’t Blue: Lee’s ability to represent the ways in which our cognition sometimes acts of its own accord, dispelling memories and emotions in the midst of seemingly isolated activities. In other words, we rarely have control over how our environment determines our thoughts and feelings, so all we can do is learn the embrace the randomness of it all.

Just as death sparks a myriad of responses, so too does mature [un]requited romance, and Lee does a fantastic job of capturing this as well. Interspersed throughout the sequence are confessions (directed at an unnamed lover) that are extraordinarily poignant, subtle, and gorgeous. In “Tide Pools & Rain”, she expresses a need for that kind of intimacy again, both physically and emotionally. In doing so, she pinpoints a precise kind of longing known to anyone who’s ever loved and lost:

I think of a touch, fingertips along the small of my back, fingertips running parallel along my spine to reach my shoulders, my neck, my face. I think, fuck, I miss that. I miss that. I miss a feeling, a certain feeling, a feeling of saying I love you. I miss saying I love you more than anything in the world.

Similarly, “Spaces in Transition” begins with a reaction to how our partners begin as nothing and become all-encompassing:

The mornings in bed when you turn over to see someone there, a sleeping body you barely recognize. Who is this person lying next to you and what is this overwhelming feeling you have? For a moment you don’t recognize this person who has somehow managed to infiltrate your life so seamlessly. Three months ago they didn’t even exist. Today, they have taken over everything, become everything, are everything.

“Tide Pools & Rain” also finds her commenting with brilliant simplicity on the necessity of confessional writing while also addressing the aforementioned sole detriment to The Sky Isn’t Blue (that the fancifulness of its language sometimes impedes its messages): “To miss feelings and the feelings of saying certain words. Because words matter. Because word can never match the complexity of what is felt but words are the only approximation we have.” Here, Lee acknowledges that emotions are often too complex and intangible to represent accurately and completely; rather, the most we can do (which she does) is signify them within creative outpourings.

Even at its most abstract and impenetrable moments, though, Lee’s devastating truths about what it means to be alive still pierce through. It’s often said that ignorance is bliss, yet how many artists really delve into the inverse relationship: that creative and critical thinking is torturous, for the more we question ourselves, others, and the skies that surround us, the more we allow existential crises to disappoint and scare us. Alas, it’s all a part of the human condition, and Lee’s The Sky Isn’t Blue does a tremendous job of letting us know that no matter how we feel or what we think, we’re not alone.

Ekphrasis Becomes Distant Confessional: On Janice Lee's Damnation

Hell isn’t just other people. Janice Lee’s gift is lyricizing the intersection between the cerebral and emotional, and in Damnation, the fourth book by her I’ve read, the canvas of her metaphysical exploration shifts in bursts. Told from multiple perspectives, ekphrasis becomes distant confessional inspired by the broody films of Bela Tarr. There’s a cinematic scope to the narrative and the viewpoints range from the wide panorama to the close-ups zooming in on love, obsession, and time in a ménage a trois of existential longing. Life is absorbed through a controlled aperture, the negatives highlighting the inverses of normalcy. Tarr is known for his long, lingering camera takes that paint the tortured souls in deliberation. Though many of the chapters in Lee’s Damnation are short, their effect is similar, forcing a closer inspection of the subject, relativity stretching time as in the context of making love:

If sparked by passion or love or other sad, comparable urges, there is not enough time. But once it’s done, after the climax for one or preferably both, there is the silence and waiting that comes from a union that can only occur in very certain circumstances.

Circumstances stand as background props to the internal inquisition that rages within the characters. Spurred by the arrival of a “strange looking copy of the Holy Bible,” madness rivets in an unending shower and the film reel shakes with longing. Lights expose scenes that drip with yearning and regret, boosting the contrast like a stark black-and-white film. Even in the shortest pieces, Lee makes us feel the onerous weight of time burdened by doubt as graphically startling imagery is punctuated by questions and the ephemeral is flanked by the visceral:

Sometimes one willingly enters a dark and empty space, the creaking of the loose boards below, the phantom moonlight above. I had a dream that I was carrying a wounded deer in my arms. He lay there limp, depending on me completely and solely for the permission to go on living. Then I dropped him into the river. How can you forgive an act like that? Why were we only made to die?

And in another instance where the question is presented first to a butcher:

He is calm with the exception of the lingering savagery that thwarts his soft grey eyes. Why do men kill each other? He has often asked himself, yet today, he thinks he understands. From the depths of the earth, he thinks he can hear the dead stirring, then screaming, such horrible screaming that originates from below the ground.

It’s a controlled presentation, an auteur not just pulling the strings, but tearing them asunder and seamlessly stitching them back together again. Lee is a visualist that paints with her words the way a cinematographer paints with light. But she’s also switching brushstrokes to fully articulate the psychological diffusion of human ambivalence. Themise-en-scène varies in that pursuit of damnation at the outskirts of society and her choice of film stock in terms of diction bounces from physical bombast to meditational ruminations that alter the visual lexicon.

With no future nostalgia for rain or lost love, the young couples in the dance are careless tonight… Outside, the music is faint and spilling out onto the empty streets, protracted and muffled by the sound of falling water. The next time it rains, it will remind him of loss, it will sting like needles, and he will only see her face.

And:

There is an unreality that splits us apart from another reality beneath.

Sometimes we eat others to affirm our own existence.

Sometimes we forget what we see the moment we’ve seen it.

Memory is tricky that way.

I’m not sure if I love God the way I’m supposed to.

It’ll come in time.

No, I don’t think it will.

The problem is, even sight can be deceiving and perception skews with changes in the lighting. The graphic menagerie scours for implicit weaknesses, shortcomings of any attempt to capture a moment authentically. There is a tension between the subject who wants to remain elusive and the observer, a juxtaposition emphasized by the synthesis of form and content:

Seeing is often just about forgetting.

This, probably, is an abomination.

Whose abomination? God’s?

Storyboards from the two Bela Tarr movies, Santanago and Damnation, serve as an appendix and the imagery is like a lifetime flashing in front of the reader:

His conception of his childhood was a series of connections he had drawn between all the coexisting elements of that scene.

Damnation isn’t just about hellfire as misery can take on millions of different permutations. Nor is it about a single place or perspective. It’s bound up in the loss of time and the urges that impel us into the futile attempt at thwarting age. The film, Damnation, is about a hapless wreck named Karrer who is in love with a married cabaret singer. Every scene is filmed so that non-speaking extras orbit with as much personality as the protagonist, their faces wracked by inexplicable feeling. You can literally screenshot every scene and marvel at the framing. In the same way, the segments in Lee’s Damnation are frames stratified in desolation, sorrow, and misbegotten aspiration, teeming with as many questions as unspoken answers. Their hope is what damns them:

All stories eventually are stories about disintegration. If the hero didn’t disintegrate, it would be resurrection. And that doesn’t happen in our world. Yet, the hero continues on his path to ruin, because he knows nothing else outside of that purview.