On Eating Books: An Ambivalence

My friend asks the question: if you had to eat a book, which book?

We’re on the screen in our squares to speak Spanish together, a language in which we’re varying degrees of not-very-fluent. We laugh. A short book, a book of poems maybe, says B, naming one poet she likes. Gatsby, says the one who posed the question, which is a good choice—would probably taste like clean linens and wild parties, like pearls and excess and some cocktail I wouldn’t know how to make. Like a distant light at the other edge of the water, meaning something.

If I were going to eat a book as comedy, the book would have to be Ulysses. I’d eat it in honor of my 15-year-old self sitting and talking about the book every morning one fall in a room with four men, varying degrees of a little bit older than her, which seemed, at the time, like a lot older. Varying degrees of a little in love with all of them, with the book, too, which she read when she was the same age as Milly Bloom, that’s not a typo, daughter barely a character, her name just one vowel-slip away from her mother’s. Who read Molly Bloom’s famous breathless sex monologue before she’d ever kissed a boy. Who repeated yes yes I will yes to herself trying to understand something about being a woman. Who underlined lines like ineluctable modality of the visual and a chemistry of stars in violet gel-pen.

If I were going to eat a book because I really wanted to, the question gets harder. I don’t think I would want to do this, I say with my clumsy vocabulary, and A agrees. I think about what Eula Biss wrote about how we use the word consume to talk about engaging with media, but this isn’t really right because if you read a book the book is still there afterwards. I’m in full lyric poet mode today, I want to eat the sky, I told my friend, and I meant this, but what I really want is to eat the sky and for the sky to still be there. I want to eat the sky precisely because I can’t do it. I memorized Maya Jewell Zeller’s poem because I needed the poem to live in my body: I wanted to be a flood. I wanted flood to know how I felt.

If someone wanted to eat my book of poems, I’d want them to do it. Julie Carr shot her own book in the woods with a gun, wrote a great essay about it. Or she had a friend do this. I can’t remember. My friend is learning how to hunt. I’d let her shoot my book. As performance art or as a beautiful way of destroying each other. Alternative to being hung up in the attics. I’d eat all six volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. The poems of Alejandra Pizarnik.

A risk, to put myself that close to these words. Better, safer, to memorize them responsibly and repeat at will. I do clutch books to my chest when I’m loving them too hard, is the thing, I do hold them close as though the object actually contained the thing I were loving, which of course it does and doesn’t. Eating H.D.’s Trilogy would feel disrespectful and isn’t what I actually want; what I want is to sleep on the sun-baked rock of it, to slip into the river of it, to let the book read me. Which it already has.

Okay: I’d eat one of my own illegible notebooks. To teach myself something about what we can and can’t hold onto. Proust would taste like madeleines. I’d taste like notebook paper, like ink and vanilla chapstick and coffee stains. Like the feeling of an unsaid word in your mouth. Like the idea of the thing itself. Like the time I spent searching myself for the next sentence. Like someone else’s memory becoming indistinguishable from yours. Caffeine and saltwater. Dust motes caught in sunlight. Kisses pressed in books. First sip of illicit tequila. Tap water when you’re desperately thirsty. Cut grass on the first day that feels like summer. French fries when I said I didn’t want my own order, then ate all of yours, and you were actually a bit mad but we still laugh about it. Crushed little stars. Burnt sugar.