📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00058 ¶ from Essayism ¶ Brian Dillon
Shall we take dust as the founding metaphor by which to broach the unruly topic of the essay? For sure, it sounds deathly, as though the form is lost to the world, consigned to libraries and anthologies. (As if those are ever really dead.) There have been times – ours is not one of them, I think I will want to say – when the essay has seemed antique and moribund, fit only for the classroom and to become an object of nostalgia for the improving or diverting literature of the past. Essays, ancient or modern, can seem precious in their self-presentation, like things too well made ever to be handled. Touch them however and they are likely to come alive with the sedimented evidence of years; a constellation of glittering motes surrounds the supposedly solid thing, and the essay reveals itself to have been less compact and smooth than thought, but instead unbounded and mobile, a form with ambitions to be unformed. Which is to say – I can’t prove it yet – that the venerable genre of the essay has something to do with the future, with a sense of constant dispersal and coalescence. And for what it’s worth my attachment to them seems of the same conflicted order: I want essays to have some integrity (formally, not morally, speaking), their strands of thought and style and feeling so tightly woven they present a smooth and gleaming surface. And I want all this to unravel in the same moment, in the same work; I want the raggedness, the patchwork, a labyrinth’s-worth of stray threads. You might say I’m torn.
—Brian Dillon
—found in Essayism (2017)