You walk into a library. The smell of wood pulp and the whisper of turning pages greet you. Looking around, you read the subject headings posted on the shelves—World History, Philosophy, Archaeology, Literature, Engineering—and your heart starts to race. What do you want to learn today? Maybe you’ll take a trip to the rice paddies of Myanmar; maybe you’ll relive the Christological controversies of the first centuries A.D.; maybe you’ll contemplate the poetic potential of superstring theory. So much knowledge and experience available, and you want it all. If only you didn’t have to eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom.

Ander Monson’s Letter to a Future Lover is an aphrodisiac for just this kind of “book lust”. The book collects several dozen lyric essays that Monson wrote in response to marginalia, inscriptions, and other ephemera (cut-up catalog cards, human hairs) found in libraries. Monson originally composed the pieces on notecards that he “published” back into the places where he found their inspiration—each is a literal “letter” to an unknown future reader, or “lover”. The essays run no longer than two pages apiece, but each one enfolds a dizzying array of subjects, moving as if by free association from one idea or image to the next. The sheer variety and agility of Monson’s thoughts are astounding; watching his playful intelligence at work is a joy. And while it’s a high-concept book about books, Letter to a Future Lover is also infused with deep pathos, as a love letter to the world and the human lives played out within it.

“My project here is iteration,” explains Monson in one of the essays, “to collect—also in my small way—a series of moments, objects, abject items defaced by human hands or processed by unspeakable machines a generation away from ours, and by so interceding in the march of hours, the process by which the world becomes obsolete and begins to fade, to make an echo, record, an impermanent reminder of what is and was and will be still here for another generation, yours perhaps, if we could be so lucky.” On the most literal level, Letter to a Future Lover is a paean to the physical artifacts of the printed word, to books as tangible objects with histories that can be read in their wrinkles and marginalia, idiosyncrasies that given them individual personalities. But by extension, the book is also a celebration of the human traces that books house. Referring to a signed copy of a volume of poetry, Monson writes: “In the age of disassociation and fragmentation, history-free ebooks torrented on the Internet . . . there’s also this: a thing, an artifact, complete with Hancock and finger trace, which makes it more than other books, we’re meant to know.”

Part of Monson’s aim in Letter to a Future Lover is to remind us of those virtues that physical books inculcate and that sometimes seem to be disappearing from the world as quickly as independent bookstores: attentiveness, patience, conscientiousness, craftsmanship. Close reading and substantial mental work are required to follow the involuted, nonlinear threads of Monson’s thoughts; the book asks to be read like poetry, a few pages at a time, allowing space for its meaning to unfold. All works of literary fiction or poetry can be said to demand reader participation (one definition of the “literary” as distinct from mere entertainment might be that it challenges the reader to think), but Letter to a Future Lover takes this demand to the extreme. The essay “How to Read a Book” gives the instructions: “Reading is participation, but I want more of you. So mark it up. Annotate a page. …Here is a blank to fill.” Throughout the book are similar prompts to write, with blank spaces to invite margin-scribbling. The pages literally command the reader to write on them, to engage with the text not just mentally but physically, because, as Monson reminds us, we are not just brains in vats—we have bodies whose temporally and spatially bound properties encounter, engage, compete with, are themselves marked by the temporally and spatially bound books we read.

For Monson, printed books are analogous to people—unique, incarnated, mortal, worthy of preservation—so when he writes about books, he’s also writing about people. The sorrow of losing a book stands for the loss of a human relationship or a personal memory. Our physical engagement with books becomes an apt metaphor for love, especially romantic love, from which the haptic aspect cannot be removed without suffering great diminution. Ebooks are like the long-distance relationships of reading—they may serve in a pinch, getting us through in circumstances where we have no other choice, but in the long run they will never be as satisfying and will never replace the original, in-person phenomenon.

A book is a container of ideas, but Monson is more interested in the ways in which books are vehicles for transmission of the human. The last words in the last essay of Letter to a Future Lover are: “Everything we’ve written, what we’ve read, what we’ve collected, what we’ve bookmarked on what pages, what notes we left pressed herein, what we have included, discarded, defaced, lost and then replaced, how it’s filed and organized: it’s all a carrier, a vector, an edifice of us.” Many of the essays are based on books from the collections of friends and poets Monson personally knows, some deceased. In these cases, the books very literally become mementos of the persons who owned them, who read them, who wrote in them. Annotations and marginalia hold such an importance for Monson because they represent moments when people felt particularly compelled about something, when they were struck with enough of a spark to fire a potent thought.

And indeed, like annotated books, people, too, bear lingering traces of affect; each of us is like a book in which others have left their marginalia. “We leave marks all along each other as we pass and pair and disconnect in discotheques. I fear it’s what we’re for.” Just as books enter into us, and back into others through our own writings, so lovers permeate each others’ hearts, mutually informing and influencing each others’ identities. Love is the intertextuality of souls. Monson performs this permeability very literally when he reinserts back into the books his essays on small cards, mementos of himself. Letter to a Future Lover is like a packet of seeds from the seed library that Monson discusses in one essay—it plants ideas in the minds of readers and grows itself back into the world.

Libraries and love are linked in that both must be preserved against the depredations of time. As Monson quotes from Donald Antrim, “books do not in all cases merely convey the content on their pages; in some fundamental respect, books, especially the most beautiful, shelter and accommodate their contents.” So do libraries, one might add. And lovers, too, shelter and accommodate those they love. A lover is like a custodian of the beloved. If what we care about is what we preserve, then a library is a record of human affinity. And the tragedy of the library is of the same type as the tragedy of love: what once was cherished is now forgotten or lost.

Given that physical books shelter traces of the humans who write and read them, Letter to a Future Lover asks after a very certain quality of the book that we may be losing as we march into the brave new world of digital media. It would be easy for Monson to simply rehearse the doomsday cries of critics who prophesy the death of the book and of the virtues that printed volumes represent (patience, attention to detail, etc.). He does engage in his fair share of lamentation for beautiful old things that we are losing, like card catalogs or errata sheets, and his elegies are touching. For instance, card catalogs were “products of human experience . . . composed of librarians’ heirloom idiosyncrasies. Now those are gone, cut into quarters to be used for scrap. What remains is digital, which shows no fingerprints. Convenient, certainly, and downloadable as an app, the online index lacks mystique and physicality.” But, Monson is also highly conscious of the tendency to fetishize the past. Far be it from him to settle for an easy good/bad dichotomy. He acknowledges that we should “savor the technologies we have”, recognizing that every time and every tool has its own particular beauties. Likewise, he considers that loss and decay are inevitable, necessary, and even beneficial. The ephemerality of things encourages us to appreciate their value, just as our mortality encourages us to appreciate life.

Throughout the book, Monson displays a laudable commitment to looking at a subject from many angles, not just the most obvious one. Channeling Walt Whitman, he claims, “I write to lament the speed and the availability of things. I write to exclaim and celebrate the speed and availability of things, their expanding muchness and seeming everpresence. We can contain both hearts, I hope.” One of his aims in Letter to a Future Lover is “to include something of everything, or enough so as to suggest the capacity for holding anything”. He frequently uses ambiguous referents and associative links to create multiple valences of meaning in his prose. For example, consider the following sentence: “Ideally you found this AI in a library, its natural habitat, an ideal vehicle for speaking to the future, even if it is under threat.” The ostensible subject is the ai, a sloth-like creature from Brazil that Monson has just been discussing, but “AI” may also stand for artificial intelligence, for a book (Monson has already pointed out that a book is a type of artificial intelligence), for the book in hand, for the reader, for a library, or for any slow-moving thing that is endangered by new technology. Later, Monson writes, “the language splits and we might choose our own adventure, pleasure of the wiki, pleasure of the referent, its many meanings,” evidence that this kind of ambiguity is fully intentional. With sentence after sentence written in this manner, one finds no end to the associative links and layers of meaning the text holds, until it becomes a symbol of infinity itself. Likewise, the many parentheticals that Monson includes seem to represent the infinitely branching paths of thought—reminders that, at any given point, he could have taken the right fork instead of the left, and again, and again, winding up each time in a completely different place.

Part of the purpose of the book is to provoke thought about what libraries really are—collections of objects curated and preserved for some reason. Monson uses the term “library” loosely—essays in the book are based on items found on a friend’s nightstand, or the pouch in the back of an airplane seat. We begin to see that collection and curation are everywhere, and, regarded from a certain angle, virtually any place can be considered a library. A house is a library of family memories and values. A dating website is a library of human romantic endeavors. Extrapolating this principle to its maximum, the universe is a library of everything. As in the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, the library is a symbol for the infinite universe. Monson invokes the image of the labyrinth throughout, which may stand variously for a sentence (one whose ambiguous referents give it many folds), a book, a list, a library, a human brain, or the world.

In one essay, Monson quotes a passage from Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists that could easily serve as a description of Letter to a Future Lover: “There is, however, another mode of artistic representation, one where we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, where we do not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to be, if not infinite, then at least astronomically large.” Monson adds, “Therein we find the sublime.” True, but this artistic mode can also be exasperating. The critic Simon Schama said of Eco’s The Infinity of Lists, “If its pleasures easily overwhelm its irritants, that’s because the book has the charm of extreme greed.” The same judgment applies to Letter to a Future Lover. Monson introduces new ideas and makes associations at a furious pace, but rarely pauses to explore any of these ideas in depth. In this way, the book is just like a library or like the world—too much to take in completely. One gets the sense of walking down a library aisle, skimming all the titles, rather than stopping to take out one book to read for several hours. His lyricism is fantastic—each line reads like poetry—but it seems at times to be covering up for a lack of systematic thought or deeper research.

But “covering up” is not really fair, because the purpose of the book is not to engage in a systematic analysis or deeply-researched explication of a topic, but rather to serve as a seedbed for one’s own musings. As Monson puts it: “[Read] until you’re full or filled with ideas for what to write.”  Moreover, Monson is completely open about these idiosyncrasies of his own writing and thinking style:

How do you read? I am not so orderly as the [reading log of my wife] above; instead, a spaz, a slob, a spiral, I move midway from book to book, stack to stack, thought to thought, labyrinth to labyrinth until I’m headfirst in the thicket. I’m not proud of it, my shallowness, but then a line or reference suggests another, and I ricochet, read, and recollect. Each one illuminates a node and my brain goes aah then more and opens wider. It will never be enough.

This is how one reads Letter to a Future Lover. It forces you to ricochet from one thing to the next until you’re in the thicket of Monson’s ideas. If Monson’s project sometimes seems a little thin, it’s thin in the way an encyclopedia is thin: out of necessity, because it’s spread to cover such a wide terrain. His skimming-the-surface style is the very thing that allows his writing to shade the infinite, reminding us of the sheer number and variety of things in the library of the world. It is this style that sends us back to the shelves to explore.

What comes through in Letter to a Future Lover is how strongly Monson loves the world, how wide his embrace of it is—for a library is nothing less than documentation of the world, and love for libraries is a proxy of love for the world. “An alphabet is an aphrodisiac for a certain sort of reader, isn’t it?” he writes. “To know there is a list like this is to want to penetrate it deeply, to understand its depths and pockmarked passages, to need to see where they lead eventually.” An alphabetic list is an aphrodisiac, a library (which is a giant alphabetic list) is an aphrodisiac, and so is Monson’s book, in which the essays are organized alphabetically. And ultimately, all these aphrodisiacs are rooted in the aphrodisiac nature of the infinite: the knowledge of all that is out there awaiting one’s discovery sparks the desire to penetrate it all, even while one knows that one cannot get to it all—or precisely because one knows that one cannot get to it all. Theologians term this a “positive mystery”—not a mystery in which something is merely hidden or unknown, but a mystery which can’t be fully fathomed, no matter how much you come to know or understand about it. It is a mystery without bottom, in which there is always more meaning to grasp, always space for a desire to penetrate and comprehend more deeply: an inexhaustible fount of pleasure, and an inexhaustible fount of future lovers. As many times as we may forget this, Letter to a Future Lover never tires of reminding us.

Josef Kuhn is an MFA candidate in creative writing at George Mason University.

Urgent matters are infinitely demanding of our attention. As I write these words, thousands of Syrian asylum-seekers flood the borders of Europe. A long-simmering conflict between the government and Islamist rebels flares up again in Tajikistan. China’s economy falters, sending waves of volatility throughout the global market. American pundits blame the Black Lives Matter movement for the fourth fatal shooting of a police officer in the past two weeks. Where I live, in Washington, D.C., the homicide count surges; nine months into 2015, it has already surpassed last year’s total of 105.

Instead of participating in protests, aiding refugee centers, or crafting concerned editorials, though, I am leafing through a volume of experimental poetry and prose titled Lemonade   everything was so infinite. [sic], published by the London-based independent riso press LemonMelon. The book comprises seven contributions by seven different authors, each responding in some way to the same cryptic line from Kafka’s notebook—Limonade   es war alles so grenzenlos.—and to a novel by Hélène Cixous that takes Kafka’s line as its title. The pieces vary widely in form. Several are free verse or prose poetry; one is ostensibly a dialogue, though it includes the speech of only one interlocutor; one breaks from traditional written formats entirely, employing both text and computer-generated graphics.

For a hint of the book’s flavor, consider David Berridge’s ‘Lemonade’, a verse/prose bricolage including non-sequiturs, absurdist imagery (‘lemons orbited the earth / lemon snowballs hurled themselves at him from the heavens as if the gods / were juicing’), personal memoir (‘drinking lemonade listening to the rock n roll / late at night a faint signal of Radio Kent’), lists of lemonade or juice brands, and bits of meta-analysis on the writer’s project (‘LEMONADE = IMAGINATION’; ‘lemonade is lemonade but I’m also going to think of it as writing’). The piece reads as an inventory of all possible associations with lemonade in the author’s mind; forty-six pages long, it demonstrates the extent to which a household commodity can become the launch pad for infinite musings. Similarly, Emma Cocker’s ‘infinite’ attempts its own sort of catalog of everything, a list of every kind of noun at all levels of the abstraction ladder, mimicking the experience of a God’s-eye view of all that exists, while Rachel Lois Clapham’s piece, ‘.’, takes the semantic function of the period as its point of departure, playing with different contextual meanings of the word stop.

The wordplay within these pieces is frequently clever and surprising, and their formal experiments raise intriguing questions about infinity and our relationship to it. But does all this elaborate verbal tinkering serve any purpose besides cerebral, highbrow entertainment? Throughout my engagement with the book, the issue of relevance would not leave me. Discussing a Roberto Bolaño novella in The New York Times Review of Books, Stacey D’Erasmo asks, ‘What can it mean . . . that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint, and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements?’ Art, especially the more esoteric forms of so-called ‘high’ art, can easily perform an escapist function, allowing its practitioners to engage in abstruse, speculative conversations while remaining aloof from political and social struggles on the ground.

Lemonade   everything was so infinite. partly exonerates itself from this charge through a self-consciousness about its own esotericism. At one point in Cocker’s ‘infinite’, there appears the sequence: ‘Kafka; lemonade; everything; waste; social value; the infinite’. Berridge, especially, pokes fun of the project throughout his piece, with lines like ‘the lemon told me / your absurdism is just a stop gap’. A voice addressed to the speaker of the poem comments, ‘sorry I vanished there for a couple of years / I was rather stymied by your avant-garde oompah’. Cocker and Berridge seem fully conscious of the potential for this kind of writing to be received as useless art-school fodder, eliting itself into obscurity.

But merely ironizing a lack of social value does not create such value. What saves the book from sliding into cultural irrelevance, to my mind, is the critique of abstraction running through it. In a way, the book does battle with the very esotericism it seems to represent, championing instead a fine attention to the sensual, emotional, and intellectual joys in our immediate vicinity.

To see how this works, it’s worth examining the way the individual pieces of the book function together as a whole—or rather, how they don’t. Each of the pieces is titled after one of the seven parts of Kafka’s sentence: ‘Lemonade’, ‘  ’, ‘everything’, ‘was’, ‘so’, ‘infinite’, and ‘.’. Marit Münzberg, the volume’s editor and one of its contributors (as well as head of LemonMelon), initially released the pieces serially and gave each author access to the preceding writer’s works, with the idea that the individual ‘words’ of the book would gradually weave together into a meaningful ‘sentence’.  What results is far from a coherent statement. In subject matter, style, form, and tone, the seven pieces are strikingly distinct from one another. Instead of engaging directly with the other authors’ works, most of the pieces only refer explicitly to Kafka’s sentence or to Cixous’s novel. Lemonade   everything was so infinite. is like an experimental manifestation of the ‘ultimate-book’ that Cixous’s narrator is attempting to write—a ‘book of phrases’ or ‘freed moments’, unlimited by the obligations of consistency or explanation, ‘a book where each phrase is a moment. Each one complete and necessary. Each one self-reliant’. This applies both within the individual pieces, most of which are written in fragmented form, and to the book as a whole, if the seven pieces are taken as its ‘phrases’.

The independent stature of the book’s pieces—their distance from each other formally as well as thematically—resembles the conceptually interrupted sentence on which they were based, ‘Limonade   es war alles so grenzenlos.’. One way to parse Kafka’s words here is to recall the sentiment of William Blake’s line, ‘To see the universe in a grain of sand’: the most discrete elements can themselves offer perspective on the endless. As Berridge’s ‘Lemonade’ reveals, traces of the infinite appear in phenomena as simple as a glass of lemonade. But this reading doesn’t address the idiosyncratic syntax of Kafka’s line. Why the unexplained gap, leaving the relation between ‘Lemonade’ and ‘everything was so infinite’ unresolved?

Maybe this strange, indeterminate conjunction of elements was meant to suggest a different sort of relationship between the granular and the infinite—one in which the whole is both greater than and less than the sum of its parts. This is certainly true for this publication. The pieces contained in Lemonade   everything was so infinite., while they suggest parallels and reveal resonances, cannot be resolved into a single, coherent whole. Or, if they are resolved into a whole, it comes at the cost of meaning.

For instance, my original impulse was to describe Lemonade  everything was so infinite. as an exploration of the artifice in art or literature, one that reminds us of the inherent constructedness of all interpretations of texts and phenomena. I planned to point to the fixation on translation in several of the pieces, and lines like ‘sculpture as structure / writing as structure as sculpture’ that call attention to the text’s contrivance. But this approach would have ignored and excluded the indignant feminist overtones of Julia Calver’s ‘ ’, the delicate evocation of a relationship in Mary Paterson’s ‘so’, and the richly experiential dialogue in Tamarin Norwood’s ‘was’. The more carefully I studied the individual pieces, the more I was forced to broaden my thematic scope.

Lemonade resists easy generalization because it brings together seven distinct pieces written by seven individuals; they all take the same text as a starting point, but fly off at completely different vectors. The infinities presented here are simply too diverse and rich to allow for any one comprehensive interpretation. The individual parts come together in unexpected ways to suggest new meanings, but also contradict and cancel one another out, so that the sum total of meaning ends up being both greater than and less than the meaning of each individual part. Or different than, at any rate. To impose a universal reading upon the pieces is to do violence to the meaning of each one. Even the cover design of the book reinforces this idea: the titles of each piece are printed directly on top of one another, creating a whole out of the pieces, but a whole whose legibility is compromised.

In short, Lemonade   everything was so infinite. problematizes any attempt to box up the infinities present in a creative work—whether a poem or the world as a whole. Both thematically and as a physical book-object, Lemonade embodies the ‘everything’ that it is preoccupied with—spatially big and stylistically broad, encompassing a wide range of seemingly unrelated parts, (literally) rough around the edges, unwieldy, precariously bound. Its physical features also acknowledge Cixous’s ultimate-book, which ‘would be unadorned, which doesn’t mean ungraceful’. To recall in full the earlier quotation: ‘It is a book where each phrase is a moment. Each one complete and necessary. Each one self-reliant: completes its work without leaving it up to the following phrase. As if nobody knew whether another would follow.’ The book itself is the infinite universe, an impossible cosmic jigsaw puzzle.

Puzzling is an apt description of the work, with its connotations of both playfulness and frustration. Per the latter: the volume’s cover of obnoxious hot pink or green paper gestures to another quality of infinity, that it is conspicuous, ever-present, insurmountable, and for that reason also annoying. How does one even begin to talk about infinity? From what side can one get a good view of it, since it encompasses all sides? We are always in medias infinitas. Our understanding of abstract concepts is based on particulars, and infinity is the ultimate abstraction. We can only form some notion of it through objects, memories, moments—through the glass of lemonade late at night while listening to rock ‘n’ roll. Incomprehensible vastness and obdurate unknowability get tiresome after a while. Maybe we don’t want (in literature, in life) that everything would be so infinite. Maybe we want that it should be smaller, more situated, more present.

The challenge of living in conscious awareness of infinity is made palpable by a couple of clever formal devices in Cocker’s ‘infinite’. Her ostensible catalog of everything is bookended by two short segments of text printed with a nearly invisible yellow ink; the first is headed ‘On Searching,’ and the second, ‘On Losing’. ‘On Searching’ begins:

There are thousands of books in the British Library whose title refers to the act of searching. There are at least as many books about loss. Whilst some searches are conclusive, at other times the relation between searching and losing could be conceived in Sisyphean terms—akin to a rock rolled to the top of the hill, only to roll back down again. An endless cycle of finding something only for it to then become lost: searching and then losing, searching and then losing, searching and losing . . . ad infinitum.

The opening paragraph of ‘On Losing’ inverts this, replacing ‘the act of searching’ with ‘the act of losing’, and conceiving of the relation between losing and searching in ‘Penelopian’ terms: ‘akin to the nightly unraveling of a weave to avoid closure or completion, such that by morning the task can begin afresh’. Additional yellow text placed at the beginning and end of the catalog of everything indicates that the items listed are in fact titles from the British Library that refer to ‘the search for’ or ‘the loss of’. Indeed, this constellation of search, loss, cataloguing, and infinity crystallizes easily; as far as a history of human thinking goes, we are always searching for, and losing, a theory of everything—some idea that is able to contain the infinite.

Cocker’s list presents another wrinkle. A row of small yellow arrows running along the top of the first half of the list and along the bottom of the second half of the list suggests that the first half contains the ‘searching for’ books and the second half the ‘loss of’ books. But there is no clear break in the stream of words; without the arrows, the reader would think it one big list, not two. And there is no obvious difference in the type of things that appear in the first half versus the second. For instance, ‘selfhood’ or ‘a sense of self’ appears in both halves. That which we search for and that which we constantly lose are one and the same, two sides of the same coin (presented rather elegantly by Cocker as a spatial metaphor). The list is an inventory of human desire—the only things we would search for (or lament the loss of) are those that we want. But for us to want something requires that it be constantly slipping away, eluding our grasp.

In her aforementioned novel, Hélène Cixous presents life as a moment-to-moment battle to want what is already within grasp. The challenge of living the ‘truly essential life’ is to pay attention to the fine sensory-emotional realities of the present moment, rather than losing ourselves in abstractions and desires for the future. Her narrator reflects (as Cocker quotes at the beginning of ‘infinite’): ‘With what tenderness, with what fierceness we have to work every day in order to attach living importance to the very delicate things which we are constantly torn away from by the forces of war.’ Julia Calver, too, appears to have had Cixous very much on the mind when composing ‘ ’. In it, there is a section titled ‘First recorded use of ear plugs’ in which a highly lyrical, feminine prose voice is interrupted repeatedly by the word ‘AHOY!’ in large, bold-faced print. Other lines—‘To those powers / that command / of me my / literal / obedience!’ and ‘To the / immutable / forces of / oppression!’—reinforce a feminist theme. Compare this to Cixous’s narrator, who characterizes as masculine the forces of ‘war’ that constantly interrupt and degrade the feminine sensitivity inherent to the joy of being alive:

For the state of being-in-paradise . . . requires the first, the prime intelligence, the universal, the very-fragile kind, with its very broad, feathery antennae covered with sensory cells which enable it to detect the sources of the very great joys that are quivering in the immediate invisibility. But war stuns it, deafens it, war makes its stupidity reign over the world.

Besides the literal meaning, Cixous’s ‘war’ refers to an insidious, creeping effort towards ‘the nullification of women and similar beings’; its weapons are ‘boorish sounds’ that ‘rob them of the rich hours of silence and immobility’. This is a poetic war, a war against poetry. For Cixous, the forces of war are synonymous with all that deadens the meanings of words and causes us to forget what it is to be alive. And while Cixous’s writings might not attest to this overtly, I would argue that the temptation to abstraction should rightly be considered one of these forces. At the risk of trivializing the complexity of national conflict, I venture that most wars would not be possible if people saw nation-states and ideologies for what they are—abstractions—and put the abstract in its proper relation to the real. (In an essay titled ‘A Survey of the Literature,’ the writer George Saunders imagines a fictional academic discipline, ‘Patriotic Studies,’ devoted to rooting out and monitoring members of a ‘fluid-nation’ called ‘People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction’.) War is rooted in wanting things we don’t have—security, a better economy, ideological conformity. To follow Cixous’s logic, though, striving after these things requires an ignorance and even denial of the ‘very great joys that are quivering in the immediate invisibility’. How someone who is fully devoted to her momentary ‘being-in-paradise’ could, at the same moment, also desire war (or anything else, for that matter), is difficult to conceive.

Perhaps this explains why such a strong vein of this-ness runs throughout Lemonade, coexisting alongside the abstruse formal experimentations. If any one piece could be said to be the keystone of the book, it’s Mary Paterson’s piece ‘so’. Frequently alluding to the pieces that come before it, as well as to Cixous’s text, ‘so’ draws Lemonade’s other works into itself, internalizes, and connects them, the metaphorical binding of the book. ‘so’ is constructed like an Cixousian ultimate-book (surprise!), a series of independent phrases and moments. Most of these phrases or moments depict highly concrete imagery, as if the author were tired of all this infinite abstraction (‘So worn out, even more so,’ she writes). Here’s an example:

And so we wait for something to begin. We sit cross-legged, side by side, so one of us balances a remote control on our knee. The other holds a pencil in a steady hand. We are waiting for sight, sound and sense. All or nothing, so you understand. If it is not all, so it is nothing. One of us is distracted by the memory of an old flame. It flickers behind the eyelids. It is neither here nor there, but it is to do with the colour yellow. We prefer pencils, so lead is waterproof and one of us is clumsy.

This is a literature of fine feeling, of attention to subtle emotional and physical detail both present and past; it is evidence of what Cixous calls ‘the prime intelligence’. But in fact, the pieces evince a similar concern with concrete particulars and ‘the very great joys that are quivering in the immediate invisibility’: Berridge’s memories of lemonade, Norwood’s dialogue in a flower shop, Cocker’s list of ‘things’. The deeper value of Lemonade  everything is so infinite., in all its abstract formalism and evocations of infinity, lies in its reaffirmation of the world of particulars. Because the infinite is so vexingly indeterminate, it (paradoxically) directs our attention and desire toward determinate things, the small things we can grasp and appreciate. We come full circle: from seeing the infinite in lemonade, to seeing the lemonade in the infinite.

If Cixous is right, then literature should be seen not as a diversion of the elites, but rather as a tool for living the truly essential life—even (or especially) if that literature is apolitical. The attentiveness that art and literature cultivate becomes even more important in wartime, or when a junta is torturing people in basements, as a kind of resistance against the stultifying forces of abstraction. Of course, there is still tension here. Used improperly, art can still become an exclusive activity used to shut out others’ cries for help (as the intellectuals skewered in Bolaño’s novella seem to be using it). The kind of art Cixous is talking about is intended to be inclusive, opening one up to the experiences of others, helping one to take joy in others, teaching empathy. But can any art ever be fully inclusive? Readers likely won’t get much out of Lemonade  everything was so infinite. without at least a superficial familiarity with Cixous’ writing, post-structuralist theory, and avant-garde poetics. Even Cixous’ work, with its deeply allusory language and difficult, involuted syntax, is exclusive and elite to some extent.

At times, works like these might actually be no more than elaborate wordplay. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with that, unless it’s a crime to experience enjoyment while a war is going on (enjoyment independent of that war, that it). But Lemonade rises above wordplay in the moments when it prompts us to abandon wearying abstractions and pay closer attention to the world around us. And remarkably, it does so using the very tools of abstraction (poetic devices, formal experiments, gestures toward theory). This might at first seem self-defeating—what’s the point of reading a book full of abstractions just to lead one away from abstractions? But perhaps there is a certain type of person who requires a struggle through the muck of abstraction in order to gain a heightened appreciation of particulars. As Cixous’ narrator writes: ‘Getting to the essential, there are times when can’t get there without going through the non-essential which hides it.’

Thus Lemonade, in hiding the essential within the non-essential, serves as a kind of medicine for esoterics. Perhaps the real test of a book like this is the extent to which it is able to reenter the world through its reader, both of them having gained through the reading a newfound awareness of and hunger for situated reality—or as Cixous imagines, ‘unbound and free. Even from being a book’.

Lemonade  Everything Was So Infinite. was published in 2015 by LemonMelon press. It includes text contributions by David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, and Rachel Lois Clapham. More information and details on ordering a copy can be found  here, at the LemonMelon website.

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Joey Kuhn lives in Washington, DC, where he is completing an MFA in creative writing.