One Has to Take Care in Handling Fire | A Conversation with Jackie Ess
Interviews
By Lindsay Lerman
I first met Jackie Ess in my email inbox, years ago, when a mutual friend connected us. The book that became Darryl was still in-progress, though nearly finished. The rest, as they say, is history.
Darryl’s eponymous protagonist is a man searching for meaning and thrills and connection, just like the rest of us. Much has been made of one form his search takes—cuckoldry—but focusing on the putatively sensational aspects of Darryl’s journey is to miss some of the pleasures and surprises the book offers. The book is sad and tender and often funny. Sometimes Darryl is the punchline. Sometimes he’s not—just like the rest of us.
When SwR asked me to interview Jackie, I said yes right away. For a few days in June, we chatted about Darryl becoming a droplet of water during meditation, spiritual abuses, the kinds of experiences that reveal truth, the racial landscape of some of Joni Mitchell’s work, and Jackie’s next book. Our conversation was edited for clarity and concision.
Lindsay Lerman: Many communities promise their members some form of liberation. But in reality, some of these communities (or groups that call themselves communities) provide the exact opposite. Darryl expresses a wise understanding of this, and this is one reason why I’m so thankful to have spent time with your book. The book is uniquely attuned to just how good some people are at exploiting the weakness we have for thinking that something new or different might actually be better. A highly potent kind of exploitation or abuse can happen in these situations because we suspend our judgments as we try on a new set of norms. That’s actually crucial work we all have to do throughout our lives, but it’s also a vulnerable state. Snake oil salesmen and their cures abound, peddlers of war come as prophets of peace, etc. Darryl encounters these types, but he believes they’re just weird or offbeat and not actually evil. I wonder if you think Darryl makes a kind of progress—or if some of his naïveté is eliminated—over the course of the book.
Jackie Ess: That suspension of judgment is a huge part of what makes Darryl go, and I agree it has a sinister side to it. It can be exploited at the very least. And I think passive exploitation isn’t necessarily the only issue. When you suspend judgment, you can do damage as well, and Darryl definitely does. It’s a delicate thing; I don’t want to emphasize only the downsides of being nonjudgmental. But when we push ourselves past our limits, or we think we should, and we start ignoring what in an ordinary state of mind we might consider to be clear signals, maybe we become both vulnerable and clumsy. So much depends on trust, and I suppose, on resiliency. It’s nice to feel that less is on the line.
In Darryl this dynamic is strong, but also a little distorted, since Darryl is pretty blind to his own agency. You could imagine Darryl saying at the end of the book that he hasn’t done anything. This despite the fact that we’ve watched him change his life, many times, in ways that most wouldn’t dare to do. Even if the desire arose, even if the urgency—which is sometimes dypshoric, sometimes desiring, sometimes holy—even if it arose, we’d bat it down and it would just come up and destabilize us now and then. It would be an annual weed that we cut back. We’d never dare to upend our lives the way he does.
LL: I appreciate Darryl’s bravery in this regard. Even if it has a foolish quality to it—but all bravery has a foolish or dangerous edge. One of my favorite scenes in the book is when Moonbeam challenges Darryl to a meditation duel, and Darryl has an experience of kind of dissolving into the oneness of all things, maybe becoming a droplet of water. And he emerges from the experience to find that he is still trapped in a cuck dynamic—and I really mean “trapped” because he is able to say clearly that he hates it and wants out of it. He’s even a little bit aware, in the moment of dissolution, that there is no absence of power dynamics, not even as something like dissolution occurs. It’s as though the dissolution occurs, but then it also does not—it cannot happen outside a situation. (Related: re-reading this scene carefully last week really spoke to me because the book I’ve just finished features some writing I did as a teen girl about a zen master looking down my shirt during meditation and me feeling like something I couldn’t yet articulate was inescapable—that I was trapped in some way I couldn’t yet make sense of. But Darryl seems to be making sense of something similar.) I think this is a pretty important moment in the book.
JE: I’m really sorry you’ve experienced that. I just read a book, Shoes Outside The Door, by Michael Downing, about the early days of the San Francisco Zen Center. You know, between these stories in the early 1980s and the Shambhala scandals that we’ve seen come to light in the last decade (and like, many people knew before) . . . we’ve got to stay alive to that possibility of spiritual abuse. And Moonbeam is definitely someone who does that. Not in a villainous way, but in the way of a guy who doesn’t take responsibility for his actions. He’s actually the protagonist of my next book, which takes place five years earlier, in the Bay Area. His name is Adam.
I really appreciate that you see the end of the meditation; that part was important to me. Because, you know, this is a funny representation of meditation. In my experience, it usually isn’t like that—a lot of flashy extreme mental states, reckless contact with a psychotic core. But sometimes it is. I think something that Darryl gets right is that, like, that’s a lot of thunder and lightning, but in what way does it answer the question? He takes the peak experience and he asks it a question: “What do you imply.” I first thought about this far outside the Buddhist context, reading the Book of Job. Job’s sophistical friends try to convince him that everything is happening for a reason. But, when God finally appears to Job, God offers not reasons but grandeur, power, pyrotechnics. There’s something strange about that. Even if his life is made good, I don’t think Job gets an answer to his question. Neither does Darryl.
LL: Well, now I’m really looking forward to reading an Adam / Moonbean book.
I like the way Darryl is able to ask what the peak meditation experience implies—it’s pretty rare, I think, for a person to be able to do this. Is meditation a regular part of your life?
JE: Meditation is an irregular part of my life. However, it has been an irregular part of my life since adolescence, which is a long enough time given how old I am. So not so regular in the sense of daily rhythms, but very regular in that I come back to it year after year. Writing is the same way. I don’t purport to be good at it, whatever that would mean, nor to teach about it, but I’m stuck on it in some ways.
The experience of meditation in Darryl is obviously a bit caricatured, going almost immediately to very extreme and unusual mental states, which I think isn’t something that’s very common or something that should be overrated or made into a goal. After all, there are mental states still far more extreme, like orgasm, dreaming, pain, various forms of intoxication, and we don’t think of these experiences as revealing truth or that whatever truth they reveal should answer our most urgent questions or order our lives. There is a prejudice about meditation that the most psychedelic aspect is the truest part of it, and something that I maybe share with Darryl, or put into Darryl from myself, is a desire to question that assumption a little. And actually I think this assumption is questioned in Buddhism constantly—for example, in the Platform Sutra of Huineng. Darryl is taken on a crazy trip but the insight he obtains does not guide his conduct. It actually leaves him dangerously unsettled. His agency begins to enter the frame and he does crazy things with it.
It seems to me that most religions build scaffolding around spiritual peak experiences for just this reason. An experience may be well worth having but it isn’t going to tell you what to do and may drop you into a state of mind where you need a lot of help from the people around you. There have to be people you trust. Especially to deal with the restless intensities that can arise, one has to take care in handling fire. For me, what I’ve needed has been spiritual friendship. For others, perhaps a more communitarian solution is preferable. Buddhist sangha works for some people I care about. I hope my respect for that solution is clear.
The next book is very concerned with secular meditation communities, including Bay Area rationalism, and the “corporadelic” phenomenon, including the patent gold rush on psychedelic therapies as these are increasingly normalized. It doesn’t paint a rosy picture but isn’t intended to be a social document either, no more than Darryl is. We shall see how Moonbeam becomes Moonbeam. It isn’t pretty.
But, at the same time, I am not so interested in approaching these things only from a paranoid or cynical point of view. I don’t see the spiritual and human failures of such communities as particularly worse than what might happen in any given small-town evangelical church, or the official self-help world, or corporate culture, which isn’t always recognized as spiritual teaching but absolutely is that (and it sucks).
I hope no one comes away from my writing and says, “Oh no, kink and queerness and meditation and psychedelics are so dangerous,” because that is not at all what I want to say. This is the setting I’ve chosen. I think I can tell a few stories from there, but there are problems in every setting. The only way to make this truly clear is to write much more, which I hope I’m able to do.
LL: I’m thinking about how Darryl wonders whether he’s just a character to some people in the book and what it means for an artist/writer to achieve “relevance.” I think all artists who hope to sell their work suffer from the flattening of the marketplace into something like character. It’s also not unrelated to Darryl’s concerns (partially told as a joke, but maybe also not a joke) about Oothoon thinking Darryl fits the profile for a new recruit into her “trans army.” Before I sent you these questions for this interview, I went back and looked at our first emails years ago, when Darryl wasn’t yet called Darryl and you had a draft you were starting to send around. What stood out to me was your wondering if this book could have a place in more mainstream markets, and the conversation we had about how the mainstream market probably wasn’t yet ready for it. (Not just in terms of “trans stories” or even trans-adjacent stories, but also in terms of what’s taken to be queer or non-mainstream sexual content.) But I think the market has changed considerably since then. Do you have conflicting feelings—do you feel some tension around this, or are you more or less at peace with how it all works?
JE: I think I am at peace. As far as Darryl’s concerns about trans recruitment, it was meant partly to mirror an experience I was having. A guy gets drunk, talks gender with you, then gets sober and gets angry with you. “No, Jackie, I won’t transition!” And it’s just like . . . I never asked you to. I wanted to render this phenomenon of people’s inability to account for their own desires, their own confusion, their own fascination. We don’t actually hear Oothoon’s voice much, but it seems very plausible that Darryl is the one who starts all the conversations about gender, or that he over-interprets them.
LL: I’m sorry this has happened to you. I do think you rendered the phenomenon of people’s inability to account for their desires and fascinations in a way that speaks to a lot of readers. I see what you mean about Darryl possibly over-interpreting conversations with Oothoon, or letting a particular kind of paranoia and insecurity lead him to project what’s in Oothoon’s mind and heart. Still, you handle it with a light comedy-of-errors touch.
Will humor or comedy continue to show up in your work, do you think? I admire the way you went all-in with the comedy in Darryl. I built lots of comedic moments (or, they were comedic to me) into my first book, only I think I didn’t commit to them enough. But now I think, “Well, that’s fine, because if I go harder with the comedy in another book, there’s the possibility that it will surprise and delight people. And ideally, it would make them less likely to pigeonhole me as a sad writer, a creator of weepies or whatever.” Are you thinking about anything like this as you continue work on your next novel?
JE: I don’t think I could write a book that didn’t entertain me, so some joking is always going to be there. But, then again, Darryl contemplates suicide. He investigates a murder. He loses his marriage, his money; he contemplates whether he is a gay man or a transgender woman or something or nothing. So the book is full of heavy material. The new book has some pretty risky business in it as well, and it is funny, though I think the premise is less inherently funny.
LL: I believe we have a shared love of Joni Mitchell. Let’s talk about Joni Mitchell. Do you have a favorite album? Or a favorite period? Or a favorite collaboration she did?
JE: I do love Joni Mitchell and probably the late 1970s stuff most of all: the arc from Hissing of Summer Lawns to Hejira to Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. I might listen to Don Juan most often, but I think Hejira is the best, if that makes sense. I like the late stuff too. I think all the time about “The Only Joy in Town.”
I’ll just repeat what I said on Twitter about it. This is a song about walking around Rome and seeing a young Black romantic hippie hustler and falling into his beauty, and she’s too old for him, and yet somehow one of the only people who can see who he is and paint him in color. But it isn’t what we’re meant to say. So we say nothing,
At night, these streets are empty
Where does everybody go?
Where are the brash and tender rooms
In Roman candle glow?
LL: That late 1970s period is my favorite as well. “The Only Joy in Town” reminds me of a moment a few years ago when an interview with Joni Mitchell kind of lit up the internet because she said something about how she’s drawn to Black men and they’re drawn to her, and that it’s because of shared experience. Definitely not what we’re meant to say. (And we are also not supposed to take it a step further, like she did, and dress up as a Black man in a kind of . . . playful (?), loving (?) honor of him.) It all sounds a little bit insane. This past week I was listening to a discussion of Donna Haraway’s work in the 1980s, specifically her concerns that organizing around identity isn’t going to be enough—that we’re going to have to also organize around affinities. (Affinities are perhaps assumed to be more stable than identities for Haraway?) As I listened, I was wondering if we’re in a moment when we’re so attuned to issues of identity (which of course are significant) that we might have trouble understanding affinity as another important site of support, connection, and strength. As a position from which to make collective demands, etc. If affinity is going to move us forward and improve material conditions for the largest number of people possible (for example), we’re going to be on shaky ground—cringey ground, uncomfortable ground. I don’t know if Joni Mitchell claiming to have shared experience with Black men is this or not, though.
JE: Art Nouveau! Joni won’t be forgiven by some people for what I was calling “painting in color.” I think perhaps what is resented is actually her freedom to do so rather than anything particular she says. And it’s not like she declared her affinity in a vacuum. Charles Mingus or Wayne Shorter or Q-Tip could have checked her on that, and if they saw no need to, why should I? There is a funny thing about the narrowness of some concept of identity-bounded art which in this case asks us to tell these particular Black artists that they have no right to welcome who they please or choose for themselves which lines to hold. I don’t speak very directly to this in Darryl, but part of the reason I chose to write in that voice was because I was interested in writing without a pass. It was important to me to speak out of turn in a way. It was an artistic constraint; i.e., writing within the very finicky rules governing the responsibilities of representation, the reclamation of slurs, the lived experience bar for writing about certain characters, etc.
LL: Yes.
JE: I think if I was going to bring a question to Joni’s racial picture it might be more like, “Where are the Black women?” or “How about indigenous people who don’t want to participate in your symbolic economy as Castaneda-ish wise tricksters?” She is a great poet but there are likewise some very serious problems with her view of the world. Perhaps the point is that her art is so honest, and so emotionally transformative, that these are things I might address or not address and still go with her. I might just say that I’ve returned to the Church of Joni for many years, and have found that, even in the ways I don’t care to imitate her, there is something to understand. Perhaps I flatter myself to hope that I will someday be extended the same courtesy. I think that’s what it means to trust an artist.
Lindsay Lerman is a writer and translator. Her first novel, I’m From Nowhere, was published in 2019. Her second book, What Are You, will be published in 2022. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Entropy, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. She has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Guelph.
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