Close to Nothing with Nowhere to Be
Out of Nowhere Into Nothing by Caryl Pagel. University of Alabama Press, 2020. 164 pp. $17.95.
Of all the places we find ourselves in Caryl Pagel’s Out of Nowhere Into Nothing, and there are many—Humboldt Park, the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, House on the Rock, Basta Pizzeria Ristorante, Libertyville High School, Des Moines, Copenhagen, Cleveland, Chicago—the one location that remains conspicuously absent is ‘nowhere’. Despite Pagel’s many references and invocations (e.g., “You do not wish to go nowhere”), nowhere is never where we find ourselves.
Strictly speaking, of course, ‘nowhere’ is not a place, so it is of little surprise that we are unable to locate it. Place is so paramount in this collection that, if pressed to identify a single unifying characteristic of these ten essays, we could hardly do better than to note their locations. But no matter how far we stray from nowhere, we are unable to escape the long shadow it casts. Our first encounter comes before we even open the text: Out of Nowhere Into Nothing, a delusive title and the source of the nowhere and the nothing said to comprise this collection.
Shadows stand in deceptive relation to bodies. Best understood as a reflection of absence, it is from shadows that we draw our expectations regarding what they represent. The same is true for titles. At first glance, this collection looks to acquire its name from its titular essay. In “Out of Nowhere Into Nothing,” Pagel examines our emotional response to literature, grounding her exploration in her own emotional response to the Sherwood Anderson story “War.” Many of Pagel’s essays follow a similar path: she first looks to the self before casting her gaze out into the world. Here, she considers psychological explanations for this emotional response, narrowing her focus to a Lee Ann Roripaugh essay discussing mirror neurons (“Poem as Mirror Box”), the cells of the body that supposedly allow us to feel an echo of what is experienced by the person or character about whom we are reading. But this echo, which echoes the shadow in its deception, does not further our understanding. The most we can uncover about this essay’s title (and, therefore, the collection’s) is that it also the title of an Anderson story. However—and please pardon the expression—this knowledge leaves us nowhere.
What does it mean to go out of nowhere and into nothing? This statement initially appears to us as a tautology; the nouns in this construction both constitute a lack. But this lack is radically different in either case. Take nowhere. To be nowhere is to be without place. We cannot go to nowhere—we cannot walk there, drive there, fly there. Occasionally, we can arrive there. It is only when we are without a semblance of place that we have reached nowhere. But nowhere is best grasped from the grounds of somewhere, such as when we see a deer suddenly emerge out from the forest.
Nothing is different. Nothing comes about in mood; it is a space of joy or anxiety wherein objects fall away. So whereas nowhere maintains its ground (even in its lack), nothing must be groundless. Since Descartes’ invention of the mind, we have grounded ourselves in our representations of objects to consciousness. We only ever experience the void of nothing when we lose these cognitive grounds. In this collection, Pagel presents conflicting accounts of nothing. The essay “Paul’s Revere” is an exemplary depiction, an essay in which mood overwhelms the reader; however, in “Sinkhole Suite,” Pagel commits a fundamental error, claiming we can “do nothing.” But we cannot do nothing: this would be to fully embrace groundlessness; to die. The closest we come to ‘doing nothing’ is when we exist in a space of ‘not doing’. This is the answer Pagel is searching for when she discusses the composer John Cage in “Sinkhole Suite”: there is no such thing as nothing. There is not a system, nor a hole, nor a frame.
That is to say, there is always something. Let us return to the titular essay. Mirror neurons allow us to experience an echo of what someone feels when we read about them. This echo resembles, in sense, the shadow; in its conceptual form, however, we call it a ghost—or a trace. Pagel seems aware that we can locate this trace throughout history. Her essays focus on personal histories: the testimonies we render, the indelible marks ghosts leave on our lives. But these ghosts are not nothing. Indeed, they must be something to haunt us. And this haunting matters very much for Caryl Pagel.
In the collection’s best essay, “Lost in Thought,” Pagel considers the work of two Chicago street photographers, Harry Callahan and Vivian Maier (in “What Remains To Be Seen,” Pagel mentions rereading it—the ghost of an essay). Her first experience of Callahan’s work came during an “oddly haunted by the as yet experienced” visit to her brother in Washington D.C. While viewing excerpts from a series titled, “Women Lost in Thought,” Pagel describes the women at the center of Callahan’s candid photographs as “made compelling, unprotected subjects, uncannily physical while still void of the soulful spark one usually associates with portraits.” Maier’s work is different. Unpublished in her lifetime, she too shot photographs of Chicago’s street life, but her art is ineluctably haunted by the ghost of the observer. Pagel finds a kinship in Maier; she read about her at a time when her “attention [was] regularly resid[ing] in the far-off place where ‘lost’ exists” (of course, if such a place exists, it is not nowhere). Moreover, as Pagel roamed the streets of Chicago, passing groups of pedestrians, she felt an ecstatic distance from herself: “a ghost in the company of ghosts, each dreaming of lives unlived.”
In Out of Nowhere Into Nothing, there is no ‘nowhere’, just as there is no ‘nothing’. We cannot, as a matter of fact, conceive of what such a work would look like. The success of this collection lies in Pagel’s attempt to bring us as close as she can to that space. By concentrating on what haunts us, what we testify to as well as where our homes are—our place in the world—she opens a distance wherein we can contemplate the nowhere and nothing of our existence. There we realize that to go out of nowhere and into nothing, we must find our place while simultaneously losing our ground. That is to say, we realize that this distance is something—and so are we.