Uncommon Ways of Seeing the World

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I love interesting, intimate, and unexpected descriptions when I read because in the hands of a great writer, I see the world in different ways. Today, I want to talk about Brian’s uncommon ability to work with description throughout So You Know It’s Me. This book probably affected me most in how it showed me the world in different ways. The narrative that emerges from these essays takes place in a college town, Tuscaloosa, Alabama but the way this story is told and the kinds of descriptions Brian uses make you think that this story, this mystery, is taking place in a whole new world.

Brian’s finest descriptions come when he is speaking directly to the unnamed woman he is writing to about how he sees her. There is such tenderness and generosity of spirit and at times even eroticism in how he sees her and understands her, probably in ways she is unable to see or understand herself. The longing in those descriptions pulls at me terribly. That is not a bad thing.

When he sees her at the UA rec center, Brian writes:

It is because you believe in movement without movement. It is because you want to move your legs up and down like pistons -- no, not pistons, as that would conjure up images of machinery and mechanism and you are neither of these things: you are human, toned. You are not of the machine: you are its operator. You are the one who makes the sloping roller ramps beneath the pedal links slide back and forth like marbles down a chute of a game I played as a child, when exercise was part of existing, throwing my body into leaves, chasing my neighbor around the backyard because that was the game that we played, because that is what was expected of us.

There is so much going on in that passage -- the body as a machine, the elliptical machine as a childhood game, these descriptions evoking a memory that not only reveals how he sees her but how she makes him see himself, what she makes him unearth from within himself.

Then, at Barnes and Noble, the unnamed woman is sitting at a table in the café.

I would’ve come over to you, to the table near the window where you sat, but I would have no place to put my drink­ -- it would’ve left a watery broken ring on the table, and I could not put you through that again: those nights where the boys with their parents’ bank cards bought you drinks they thought you liked because they were drinks you pretended to like­ -- they were too red, too sweet, they curled your tongue like a thin paperback in a back pocket, though I would not describe your tongue this way: you know the story of Lennon and Chapman and Salinger and that is something I don’t want you to think about: about blood, about The Dakota, about autographs.

I love this passage for the tone, the cadence of it, the way it works at the language level with each word connecting to the next in an unexpected way. I’ve never thought of a curled tongue as a paperback book but when I read this passage, I find it to be a lovely, apt description. I can see the pink curl of flesh as clearly as I see the curved pages of a book in a back pocket. This book contains many such gorgeous images.

Later in the book, Brian sees his unnamed woman at an intersection:

My view of you was blurry­ -- the type of blur evident when all is in motion: mothers moving in quickly to place kisses on the cheek, everyone quickly turning their heads when hearing the word ‘sister’, hearing a song, hearing a name that is similar to their name.

These essays originally appeared on Craiglist so the words, themselves, were fleeting, a blur. As I read this description, I thought about the glimpses we catch of people, the blurs of human bodies in motion. What Brian captures here is everything that can go through your mind when you see someone you long for from a distance. This passage put me there on the street corner, holding that same gaze. I love when writing makes me feel immersed in a scene.

In a parking garage, Brian thinks about how she once said his name:

You said my name once, before you knew it was my name. You knew the weight it carried, the touch of the tongue to the roof of your mouth briefly, pausing for a second before forcing the hot air out.

The physicality here and the perfect description of the tiny moments that go into the saying of a name are what captivated me. As a writer, Brian’s ability to see the world in such an intimate way has really helped me think about how I can break down anything from a breath to the speaking of a word to an affection shared by two people in more beautiful, unique ways.

Toward the end of the book, Brian thinks about cooking with his Missed Connections woman in his kitchen.

If I told you that they took handfuls of soil and cupped them in their hands like water and spread them out in empty gaps, would you think of the time we made dinner together, rolling the dough into circles, flattening everything yet being mindful of the spreading out, the melting together. Would you remember the cutting of the city into cubes, the streets into lines­ -- would you remember spilling the oil, spilling the white of a cracked egg, watching it slide across the vinyl like a ghost, like our bodies if we danced while the yeast rose and the edges burned.

This is another passage where I thought about cadence and the unexpected transitions from one word to the next as well as the images those words evoked. There’s a scene at the end of the short film Logorama where the city is overtaken by oil and the black stuff starts flooding the street grid almost exactly the way Brian describes the spilling of oil and egg here. I was also drawn to the rising yeast and burned edges because these are such specific choices. To take the breaking of bread and make that into something so poetic, almost musical, is what makes the whole of So You Know It’s Me so entrancing.

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What descriptive moments did you enjoy most in So You Know It’s Me? What are some of your favorite descriptions from other books? What is a good description for you? Talk to me. Let me know it’s you.