Ambient Reading: A Method

Donald Judd’s library in Marfa, Texas. Judd Foundation.

Dear Friends,

Reading is one of the the deep wells of my being. How is it for you?

I usually read in the ordinary ways, beginning at page one and going through to the end, but I also read in some ways that feel indistinguishable from writing. One of those ways of reading is evoked here.

I’d love to know something about how you read, and the ways you are reading now. How do you experience reading as a form of attention? Let’s start a conversation in the comments.

You’ll find a shortened, two-minute version of this ambient essay in the video.

— Sal

PS: Comments were accidentally closed, but I’ve fixed it!

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Ambient Reading

I want to be reading.

I want to be reading but right now writing prevents me.

Usually I write by reading: reading begins writing. Begats.

At the moment, I am constraining myself to read only what I am writing.

I am writing to you.

If I could be reading anything right now, what would it be?

Since I can write anything down that I wish to, I should be able to please myself. To please myself entirely.

In a book I was just looking at, I read the word “anise.” I was pleased, and jealous. That writer was sitting outside, out back, by the anise. The anise gave him something to say, a beautiful word to interrupt his thinking with.

In another book I picked up, the writer was tumbling around the word “maroon” and feeling for its puns, its associations. An unhappy color. An island you can’t get off of. A part of me is still stuck there.

Sometimes it is enough to open a book and read a single word.

I open the I Ching and receive the word “innocence”

And so I go forward, without expecting anything.

Ambient reading is going forward without expecting anything.

I am full of theories, but at the moment I don’t love them.

I’m sitting in a room full of books.

To be at play.

If I weren’t writing, I would lie down and close my eyes.

Words would keep happening inside me.

When words are happening inside you, is that writing, or reading?

I’d like to spend all day reading, slowly and deeply, going word by word the way the writer meant me to, building a little city from the bricks of those words, something appearing in the air above my head. Can you see it floating there?

A few days ago, over dinner at an Indian restaurant, someone I didn’t know suggested I read Heidegger.

How many books am I in the middle of right now.

Ambient reading isn’t like the kind of reading where you lie on the couch with a book and read all day from beginning to end.

If I want to be reading, but must read only what I am writing, then I want some words which are like gymnasiums.

But I can’t help reading. I am in a room surrounded by books, and there are words on the spines.

I stole that word from the spine of a book: gymnasium. It seemed just like the gymnasium I wanted. A word which is the itself of itself.

I am supposed to be writing as if I am speaking.

But the writing and the speaking are separated by time. Writing is writing. Speaking is speaking. But both writing and speaking are reading.

I pull a book down from the shelf because of its title: In the Realm of Appearances. I have been thinking about the word “appear.”

I had forgotten it, but it turns out to be John Yau’s book on Andy Warhol, which I read some years ago.

On page 56 I see: “The artist as innocent child.”

I close the book.

Sometimes I wonder why we need writing at all. Writing in the linear sense, in the intentional sense.

Words themselves, words lifting and floating free, seem enough. More than enough. Each word is an excess.

But I am aware, of course, that I am writing now, writing in just the sense of transcribing my thinking, transcribing my imaginary speaking.

There are words in my head, and my hands play on the keyboard like a court stenographer.

There are words floating in my head.

There are imaginary speakings. I am speaking to you.

I am writing to you.

Which makes this a letter.

Is a letter a way of conversing when two mouths are not near each other?

I am writing to you.

If I am here reading my own words…

But I am here, reading my own words.

Give me a new word.

This is where I’ve always done poorly as a writer. If I ask for a word, they all flee, leaving only the silly, the sentimental, the overwrought, the dull, the flat, the predetermined, the obvious. Rubble.

This is one reason I like to read. To put words back into my head.

I carry around certain books to read ambiently.

I read in them, rather than read them.

Often, a single word is enough.

Sometimes you have to read a whole page, or a few pages to find that word.

“Does she mean that the afternoon should pass”

And now I have “afternoon.”

An obvious word, perhaps, because it is in fact afternoon as I am writing.

But with the word afternoon, I get a color, a pale buttery liquid yellow. And a sound, something far off that I can’t quite make out. And the motion of swaying, as if in a hammock. And the sensation of time simultaneously lived and empty. A garment on a clothesline, fluttering slightly.

I carry another book around with me because of a single phrase that occurs in its introduction.

The phrase is, “it loves to happen.”

The author himself does not know the origin of that phrase, which appeared in his notes. He can only speculate.

Another book I carry around because it suggests that it is possible to write as if no one will will ever read what you are writing, to be unselfconsciously private in public, to please yourself entirely.

To write as if you were merely reading.

Is it possible to write as if you are receiving a letter rather than sending one?

Dear Sal, the writing says, because I am reading.

When I am reading it is always as if I am reading a letter written to me.

Some books know me so well.

I have a stack of books about reading, but I don’t want to read them. Not right now.

Reading is like being an instrument that someone is playing.

Ambient reading is like two instruments meeting each other.

I love the UlyssesReader bot on Twitter. It tweets out bits of James Joyce’s Ulysses 140 characters at a time.

That’s not exactly true. The algorithm chooses sentences or phrases, parts that cohere between punctuations: it never leaves you blankly mid-word.

Let’s see what it’s saying.

Right now it says, “between his lips.”

I think of it like this: The coder took Ulysses, put it in a perfume bottle, and atomized into a mist.

These fine droplets float free.

Ulysses is liberated from its terrible weight of expectation, of protocol, of interpretation. It is freed from the literal weight of its bound books.

Right now: “between his lips.”

I look up and see Jorie Graham’s book of poems, The Errancy.

What if we thought of the words on the spines of books as representatives of the words within. Not pictures, but political representatives.

The library as a congress of titles.

What if all the pages were sealed in glue, and the only words we had left were the titles?

If we had to make a new language from only the words on spines.

So much of the language would be proper names, they would have to be pressed into new meanings.

Am I errant, do I err? Am I sent on an errand?

Or is the Errancy ongoing, everywhere, ubiquitous, ever present? Is there nothing but errancy?

(Between his lips. The innocent, the errant gymnasium. All afternoon. It loves to happen.)

If I am writing to be reading, I have a paradox of being.

Writing is frightening, reading is comforting.

Do I write to frighten myself so that I will need comfort?

Do I write to steady myself with the little march of words.

Line up! Line up! All of you, fall in line! Hold hands!

We’re taking the words for a walk, and we can’t get lost. Don’t lose anyone.

I am writing to you. You are writing to me.

I am reading you.

I am at a ouija board, listening.

Tell me myself, tell me true.

Ambient reading is a kind of permission. It is the permission to stray within the text.

No one knows where we are going.

The blue and white teacup on the handmade ouija board seems to move under its own command. Our fingers touch it but only to follow.

One letter at a time it glides to form words.

No one knows where we are going.

I imagine you reading this. I imagine reading this to you.

I am reading this to you.

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How are you reading these days? How is your attention?

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“Ambient Reading” was originally published in Reading Room by dispersed holdings, and reprinted in Its (Im)possible Formation: The Book by Onomotopee.

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