You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake by Anna Moschovakis

Coffee House Press, 2011

Review by Matt McBride

 

Anna Moschovakis opens You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake with two epigraphs. The first is by Pragmatist philosopher William James: “Systems about fact must plunge themselves into sensation as bridges plunge their piers into the rock.” The second is by Objectivist poet George Oppen: “[T]he senses have their own nature, and therefore cannot disclose absolute truth—” James’ quote asserts that all theories must be grounded in experience if they hope to be true, while Oppen’s states that experience is too relative to be a medium for anything other than individual truth, or as Moschovakis writes in the poem “[prologue],” “We take our positions with us, like folding stools to the beach” (9). It’s from this dilemma that Moschovakis writes. In a world where everything is potentially significant, where “each date must be celebrated […]/ Each moment of courage or loss or revolution/ When something pushed something and something fell down” how can one act without excluding, denying, or doing violence (9)?

 

Moschovakis lays out this central problem in the first of four long poems which comprise the book, “The Tragedy of Waste.” The poem, initially, reads like the front matter to a Beckett play. Moschovakis gives us three figures, a handful of set pieces, and the book’s central question. It begins:

 

                        You and three others are approaching a lake

                        You have two canoes, your tent, your axes

                        It is after six

                        What, precisely, is your procedure?  (13)

 

“The Tragedy of Waste,” also establishes the “mode” of You and Three Others… In the poem, desperate texts on topics ranging from John Ruskin to per capita meat consumption in 1900 are brought to bear to evidence the difficulty in answering the above question. For example, Moschovakis uses advertising as a way to demonstrate the problem:

 

  What are those 600,000 people in the advertising business up to,

                                    for instance?

                        A housewife tried to get her chores done in the morning

                        so she can go to a matinee in the afternoon

 

                        With these principles in mind,

                        set down as waste:

 

                        the production of nonessential, idleness, bad

                        technical methods  (17)

 

What those 600,000 people are up to is the creation of narratives, ones which establish in and out groups, ones which create “essentials” and their corollary, “nonessentials,” or “waste.” This is the tragedy of every narrative and is emblematic of the dilemma Moschovakis has laid out for us in the poem. How can we put these three figures in relation without excluding one, without making one “essential,” and another “non-essential”? To have a narrative is to have inequality, and stemming from that inequality, desire, and predicated on this desire is a world of continually diminishing returns. Moschovakis writes:

 

                       Human wants:

                       

                       First the necklace of bone

                       then the shift of leather

 

                       tea, tobacco, and gambling

 

                       in other words

 

                       Ten men could live on the corn

                       where only one can live on the beef  (18)

 

Moschovakis wonders if there’s a way out of this fatalistic manner of being, if there’s a way “you could/ stay where you are, irregular,” (21). She elaborates, “The challenge: to start/ not with the theory but with tangible performance// You and others, approaching// We shall be asked for a way out” (30). This “way out” is a method for establishing meaning without creating non-essentials, where everyone and everything is accounted for without remainder, an epistemology of inclusiveness. Moschovakis continues:

 

                       More than once we have been lost

                       in a trackless wilderness

 

                       […]

 

                       We glimpsed control

                       and more tragic waste

 

                       […]

 

                       The lake is upon you.

                       You have two canoes, your tent

                       The child has entered upon this desert

 

                       You have your axes

 

                       What, precisely, is your procedure?  (31)

 

The problem is that exclusion is inextricable from knowledge. So too is a kind of epistemological violence, which is the focus of Moschovakis’ second long poem “Death as a Way of Life.” In it, Moschovakis wonders if there’s a way to know without harming, to establish connections without binding. Towards the beginning of the poem, she writes, “I have been attracted to the idea that naming is a form of violence/ but does that mean we should go around calling everyone Hey You/ which seems like another sort of violence” (35)? Or, as she puts it more succinctly later, “What does grammar kill” (49)? Further complicating this is the question of whether or not knowledge itself produces violence or is the product of violence.  In a particularly eerie passage, Moschovakis juxtaposes an emblem of martial and technological “progress” of the 19^th century (a rifle capable of holding seven rounds) with an internet chat room posting:

 

                       In the 1850’s a seven-shot “Victoria”

                       revolver cost $2.50.

                       Victory is cheap

                       they say

 

                                    With seven bullets you could shoot a woman

                                    in both breasts, both ovaries, her vagina and clitoris

                                    with one bullet left for a target of choice

 

                                    Somebody may have done this

                                    or imagined it before

 

                                    I’ve imagined worse, and so have you.

                                                            —posted by  Rick. 6.19.06  (45)

 

This leads to the question, does the existence of a firearm capable of shooting someone seven times create the desire to shoot someone seven times, or does the desire to shoot someone seven times lead to the invention of a weapon capable of doing so? Moschovakis also wonders if knowledge does create violence, could it also be an anodyne, in the form of reason, for the violence it creates? Her exploration is not encouraging. She writes:

 

                        Vladimir Illyich Lenin erected

                        a museum to atheism

                        inside a grand church

                        that has since been rehabilitated

 

                        So a museum can’t kill a church

 

                        We know

 

                        that the worship of science,

                        logic, art, law, political theory,

                        fresh fruit, philosophy, conversations,

                        Yosemite National Park, a woman’s right

                        to stick to her plan, olives, justice, and

                        higher education

 

                        can’t kill a church (49)

 

Here, secular and religious worldviews are posited against each other, with the more reasoned secular stances losing out to a dogmatic kind of faith the church conditions in people. And yet, the passage doesn’t necessarily paint the triumph of reason as an unequivocally “better” option either. For instance, would trading ecclesiastical dogma for scientific “facts” (which are often as contentious, and of as dubious and origin as religious “truth”) put us in any better stead? Is any system of meaning making ever disinterested? So when Moschovakis asks what grammar kills, she does so with the utmost seriousness.

 

Moschovakis is also interested in examining the mediums we use to obtain knowledge. This is what she takes up in the book’s third long poem, “The Human Machine [Thirty Chances].” Structurally, the chapter is loosely composed as a Turing Test, an early test of artificial intelligence named after pioneer computer programmer Alan Turing, wherein a computer program is asked a series of questions to determine, based on its responses, whether it could convincingly “pass” for a human being. Moschovakis wonders how, in a world where knowledge is increasingly mediated by computers, we can differentiate ourselves from them. Moschovakis opens the poem with the following passage:

 

            No, in a shed

            under the machine

 

            You stopped brushing; then

            you resumed brushing

 

            Oh, watch the inventors!

            Oh, watch the inventors!

 

            This is the language of simple, obvious things

            smooth intercourse

            thirty chances

 

            Anna is a Capricorn. Her eyes are blue. Her favorite color is blue  (57)

 

In this passage, we see the fill-in-the-blank responses that pass for self-awareness in the age of Facebook. It is a “language of simple, obvious things.” Moschovakis will later ask, “Shall we call it ‘binary intellegence’?” (84). “The Human Machine [Thirty Chances],” underscores the terrible irony of our search for artificial intelligence: While we seek to make computers that think like people we are creating people that think like computers. As our identities become ever more interwoven with things like social media, we become ever more akin to content producing chatbots, “program[s]/ designed to take string inputs/ and return other strings,/ producing a ‘conversation’” (62). The sarcasm Moschovakis portrays the inventors with is well earned, for what they seek to “invent” is what we already posses. Their only “success” has been the creation of machines which further knowledge at the expense self-understanding.

 

Moschovakis concludes You and Three Others… with “In Search of Wealth,” which addresses the idea of compensation and unequal exchange inherent to the world we currently inhabit. One way she approaches this is through Scientology, a religion predicated almost entirely on the development of the self at the expense of others. She writes:

 

            You have heard that to advance in Scientology, you have to turn your back

            on anyone who will hinder your progress toward your goals—sick parents,

            needy friends, persons to whom you might owe a debt of gratitude.

 

            You have heard that the concept of guilt is a product of religion, but you

            don’t know where religion got the idea.

 

            Walter Benjamin said that all history is the history of guilt; to advance in

            Scientology you have to become ahistorical. Stop.

 

            The kind of guilt that Scientology seems to alleviate has its origins in the

            West, so does that mean the allure of a-historicity is also Western in

            origin?

 

            Of course the concept of guilt goes back at least to the Sumerians, but

            that was the kind of specific guilt that could be relieved by punishment, and only in 12^th-century

            Europe was the concept of ineradicable guilt swallowed whole.  (99)

 

Here, Moschovakis addresses how unequal exchange has become so ingrained in the Western ethos, starting with the notion of original sin (a debt which can’t be paid) up to religion’s most contemporary instantiation, Scientology, which encourages one to ignore all debts (except, of course, those to the Church of Scientology). Another way she approaches this idea is through Craigslist advertisements. One reads, “Beautiful Dominatrix looking for a wealthy submissive slave-w4m-27,” another, “Not into BDSM, just looking for a wealthy submissive male to provide a luxurious lifestyle, LTR or marriage” (108). Additionally, in this final poem, Moschovakis shifts from the non-grounded, floating consciousness of the earlier sections to a speaker more discernable as the author herself. At one point, she lists menial jobs she’s held and how much she was paid for them. Later on, she uses her experiences in Ethiopia to demonstrate the constantly shifting power dynamic between cultures. She writes:

 

Now you are thirty-nine and you are in Ethiopia. You meet a young aspiring filmmaker who is

shocked to learn of the existence of hunger in the U.S. When you tell her that Addis is a bit like L.A.

she say But it’s not backwards there like it is here, isn’t it all fashion and buildings and beach?

Her friends, an actress with the Ethiopian National Theater, tells you that when she visited New

York City she liked giving money to beggars. In Addis, it’s the while people who give money, she

explains. In New York, I’m the white person, so I give.  (112)

 

Here, despite all the ground Moschovakis covers, we are still at the book’s central dilemma; how can one act without excluding, denying, or doing violence?  

 

You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake is that rare book capable not only of giving it’s reader something new, but also of pointing out that which is so salient about our lives we no longer see it. With You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, Anna Moschovakis establishes herself as the T.S. Elliot of the Internet generation.