[a meditation on “Timeless Dwelling: Imagining a Genre of the Yet to Be” delivered June 20th, 2024, University College, Oxford, for “What Is Creative Criticism: A Colloquium,” organized by Joe Moshenska and Iris Pearson]

Mary Cappello

The keynote as a performative genre comes arrayed; it comes with an outfit.

Of course, I bought new shoes for the occasion—two pairs actually, but one was suede and the shopkeeper dissuaded me (pun intended) from wearing them in a climate guaranteed to be rainy; and a new satchel (red and black); and a scarf that brought it all together that reminded me of my recently deceased mother, of which she would have approved. The shoes I was in search of were women’s Oxfords—neither a literal nor unconscious paean to the place, but part of a life-long quest for the wingtips that my Sicilian grandfather wore on special occasions, with a hint, too, of the ankle-high black Beatles boots that were the definition of “cool.” Even if I only found a pale imitation of the composite I had in mind, I was hopeful that such shoes would make me more butch; old world; and that they’d be smart just in case I was not.

Every keynote comes with a ground, rocky or secure. In this case, I could feel the ground. And I could feel a sort of ecstasy of thought. I felt ecstatically grounded. Maybe the best keynotes are those that allow us to feel ecstatically grounded. I explained to my auditors that I’d called upon some magical thinking to help me feel more secure. I’d crossed paths with a harpist en route to the hall where we all convened—first, I saw her pushing her harp and then I heard her playing it; this, and the sudden appearance of an apparently armless squeegee that awakened me in my university lodging three floors up and whose task was to bring more light into my room, suggested an angelic hand in the performance I was about to give. I allowed these experiences to serve me as signs, that, at worst, “everything would go ok,” and at best, I’d been blessed.

I must also have believed I had something to give. Can we do this for one another, not just as scholar-writers, but as humans? You cannot deliver a keynote if you don’t think you have something to give. And here I’m put in mind of the starting point of a poetry seminar I once taught in which I asked students to provide me with anonymous questions on index cards expressive of their fears and desires about poetry and the course. One student wrote, boldly, sadly: “FEARS: ‘That my creativity and writing means nothing to no one.’”

That day at University College, we were a collective commons, and I’m sure that my being able to feel grounded in the thought I wished to share had much to do with the receptivity and warmth of my hosts. I say this, and yet, I have also found that the degree of anxiety that may or may not sabotage me on knowledge’s stage is often unpredictable. Does it have to do with the nature of the light in the room (soft or harsh); what I ate the morning of; whether I’d drunk enough water; the degree of scowl or smile visible on the nearest face to hand; or whatever is going on in my own life at the time that makes it impossible for me to get out of my own way? For surely, when we are over-nervous, we are in our own way, or in the way of the work: we’re unable to let the words move through us as conduit and too identified with them as their ego-abundant “author.”

The play of the intellect is a dance, but the proper stage for such embodiments is often in short supply. Do you stay behind the podium, or do you pace? Do you move closer to the audience, or do you hide? I always prefer a podium. In my book on nonfiction’s lost performative, LECTURE, I offered a context for such decisions when I wrote, “To lecture in the guise of the female body is always to risk, at best, attack, and at worst, incomprehension—because we still have no way to figure intelligence in a female form, no way to picture a combination of startling truth and un-gendered beauty.” But I countered that, too, with a nearly universalist call for vulnerability as key to the critically creative enterprise: “Child-mind might need to be pre-eminent when we climb onto the lecturing stage because we’re never not invulnerable, no matter how high the podium might make us seem, and we’ll get nowhere if we don’t humble ourselves before the knowledge we also claim to master.”

How does any of us “move freely in [our] exposed isolation,” we might ask, in the way of Verana Tarrant in Henry James’ Bostonians? “Is corporeality the essence of the lecture or its enemy?” Just as in our classrooms we take on a different voice and bodily comportment than we do at home, on the street, or with friends, at the keynote’s podium we take leave of ourselves, we become someone else in performance. In fact, we might be barely recognizable to those who claim to know us well. Embodied disembodiment: thought and language as means of transport grant the possibility of a differently arrayed self, an alternative voice, a newly tuned ear.

Every keynote is an occasion, and the question we must ask ourselves is what we will use it as an occasion for? In the case of this keynote, I chose to allow myself the liberty of a return to origins and half-sung notes: the stuff of formative starting points and unfinished business. I wanted to pursue a long-abandoned interest in “study” as verb and noun—the possibility of such in the digital age—and my aim was to use my keynote to workshop this idea rather than to mount an argument per se. I conceived of the keynote as a speculative demonstration that performs what it describes.

I arrive at this idea—of the literary étude as a form that I propose we might invent—first by responding to the larger questions posed by the symposium—about matters of genre and whether what we call what we are doing matters. (See the precis on this website, in fact: “Can criticism itself aspire to be creative? Does creative writing have a critical force? Or should we dispense with these terms altogether?”) I don’t exactly narrate my way from point a to point b, but, instead, take my cue from the idea of a keynote as a kind of carefully orchestrated improvisation characterized by assemblage, apposition, unpredictability, through-lines and returns (also known as repetitions with a difference: the “peach” that populates this keynote, for example, morphs into an apple that is and is not the same as the peach).

The keynote, as you’ll see, is multi-form; and it’s all of a piece, even though it proceeds in fragments: an imaginary letter; an actual letter; a list poem; an exegesis; and a sample of lyric essaying, all of which come together in the name of a return to origins, necessitated by the coincidence of my mother’s death with my retiring from formal university teaching. In this sense, my keynote is driven by a personal need to answer the question for myself of “now what?,” or “what now”?

At the outset, in person, I commented on what distinguished the Colloquium that Joe Moshenska and Iris Pearson had so painstakingly convened, and I think it’s important to repeat that here: “If our work defies genre,” I said, “it most probably also, in some important sense, defies ‘discipline,’ and that’s a discussion in itself, because it means we resist our own atomizing and those of the institutions that house us; it also means, though, that we might have trouble finding one another and thus the beauty of this colloquium.” I also explained the only obscurity that might need clarification in the unfolding of my talk: that I was closing the keynote with a short composition (“Diptych: Unpainted Genre Scene with Missing Apple”) from my most recently completed book, Frost Will Come: Essays from the Bardo, that treats sacred witnessing as a form of care, and that dictated itself to me following my and my partner, Jean Walton’s care of my mom, poet, Rosemary Cappello, in the months leading up to her death in September of 2022. It was important that I not make myself pause before arriving at that end note, but to read straight through—to perform the cumulative apposition—without explanation (and here I might refer a reader to the etymology of “explanation” as that which flattens).

In an attempt to revise the convention that more regularly follows a keynote—the q and a as a monolog that only passes for a dialog as individuals raise a hand to pose a question to which the keynoter then responds—I invited people, instead, to form small groups in which they discussed together what I’d presented, then to generate group questions for me to consider that I tried to respond to at the very end of the colloquium. By the time that occasion arrived, the papers the questions were written on were partially crumpled, stained with a combination of tea, and wine, and salad oil.

If a keynote has an afterlife, as it in this case, does, I can share with you the things I did not include in its performed iteration. The question: “When we study, do we abide or do we endure? What’s the difference?” It was a question, I decided, that might call for its own keynote, and thus I left it out. The cheeky sentence: “Academe: in a nutshell, church without any of its sensory aspects, a church from which ritual has been subtracted.” I edited this out because the critique seemed an all-too-easy one and not all that illuminating. In the transcript I’m making available here, I retained italics and other cues to myself to signal emphasis or pace when reading aloud, as well as words in parentheses that I might choose on the spot to include or ignore. I’ve preserved things that I cannot now recall—like whether the phrase “a peculiar energy” was a self-quotation or someone else’s words. I’ve also preserved references to the length of time it took me to read each segment aloud (not in the interest of telling a reader in advance how long it will take them to read the piece—a journalistic practice that I find generally appalling—but in order to convey the existence of the keynote-in-performative-time.) There are indications to myself of the correct pronunciation of Joe Moshenska’s daughter’s name, as well as indicators of how impossible it is for me to remember the pronunciation of the name of the painter, “Raphael.” Perhaps it goes without saying that “the professor” who I am quoting is me, as in “for this portion of our seminar, the professor said…”

The defining feature of any keynote, to my mind, is best conveyed with a double negative: you can’t NOT give it your all. You’ve been given the privilege of the podium, and of TIME. More time than others. An abundance of time. You’d better, therefore, give your audience something worth listening to, or better, give them something they will be able to dream with. It’s possible that some people, depending on the terms and conditions of their embodiment, don’t see this as a privilege but as a right and assume from the get-go that what they have to say is implicitly meaningful and worthy, without forethought. In which case, taking responsibility for one’s utterance, or considering the value of an audience of fellow humans’ time and attention is moot. It’s precisely such tacit-ness that requires us to question who and what our forms of knowledge production, our modes of address, or our affinities for the critical or the creative, serve.

For me, what the keynote will always come down to—and with it, the “paper,” the panel, the talk, the reading, the conference, the colloquium, et al—is an element of invention and surprise. Not merely for the sake of “making things new,” but driven by a politics of renovation, which might entail recycling and upcycling, intent on dismantling and remaking, even experimenting with rather than passively submitting to, the conventions that govern the embodiment of our scholarship or our literary art in public and in performance. Imagine if no two keynotes looked the same, if you really did not know what to expect, or the where, of your literal or metaphorical seat in the lecture hall. Imagine critical forms (the article, the talk) working in concert with critically informed ideas rather than in service to them.

But now I’m hinting at some of what I address in the keynote that follows where I think I’ve said it better and in a variety of ways in spite of the fact that the transcript and its detachable slide show is a shoddy substitute for the event. And, no, let’s not suggest a Zoom meeting where the keynote is re-performed. When I listen to a talk or a reading via Zoom, I suffer from what a friend of mine calls “MEGO”—“my eyes glazed over”; I’m distracted, bored, and impossibly unmet. We need to see each other face to face, to know something of each other’s shoes and of our foot pain, the ground that unmoors or holds us, with the traces of whatever we ate that day still visible on our faces and our hands. We need to believe in the chance to experience a polyphony of points of view that is only possible in a shared physics of an actually occurring present.

But enough of that. It’s time for us to pause: allow me to introduce a memory into these proceedings as I recall the time we heard a young pianist, a rising prodigy to be sure, perform Rachmaninoff at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute just off Rittenhouse Square. It was raining lightly as we left the hall, but so altered and changed were we, so exquisitely transported, that we neglected to open our umbrellas. I remember making eye contact with a stranger as we made our way through the park, admitting to each other without the need for words, our shared goosebumps. Or how about the time, more recently, when in a local concert hall in my West End neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island, following a performance of, Haydn’s String Quartet Op 76, no. 4, “Sunrise,” the children in the audience were invited to throw ribbons of differently colored translucent fabric into the air, then try to catch them on their way back down to earth. It was an activity and a display only for that instant in which pieces of gauze rose up, then fell on the children’s half shut eyes and faces, their hair. They could throw each piece with great abandon, knowing no “thing” would break thereby but light, sifted and partitioned just like the notes in the music they had heard.

I’m trying to bring to mind memories of performances not meant to be recorded, tied to their moment, essentially ephemeral. And, so it goes with keynotes which have an of-the-moment quality that cannot be reproduced and maybe shouldn’t be; in other words, as much as I hate to say it, “you had to be there.” The keynote is bound to undergo a dilution when translated onto page or screen. Left aloft to flail without a body or voice or air or fellow bodies or ground—what, exactly, is it? Can it enjoy the semblance of a continued life? Can it exist as a mine-able remnant? Is there something here worth sharing, like the peach left for us to eat following the execution of the still life? I do believe and hope there is much that is viable herein, and that readers will make something of it they can call their own, even finding traces of beautiful surprise inside my slide show, all the while accepting that it is impossible in its afterlife to be present to my keynote.

Oh, but here’s the rub, especially given the Colloquium’s question of how or if it matters what we call it: this wasn’t a keynote after all, but a plenary (pronounced by this American tongue, as pleh-nary, but by my fellow Oxfordians as plea-nary). As you can see from the opening paragraphs, I meditate briefly on the genre of the plenary and use it to frame the whole. So much for shared ground: now it must seem like my hope had really been to pull a rug out from under us. If so, so be it; may such an act impart a collective joy, the kind of joy that attends the most lively thinking at a core: a life-altering one, the elan vital of any act of criticism. “Criticism”: an operation that we perform on an idea or that an idea performs on us as it moves through us.

But I have said all of this and more and maybe better in the following composition: a plenary address that claims to be about the act of study, but that is really about joy, but not any joy—a joy underwritten by sorrow, failure, incompletion, and hope.