Writing Above

Which is a way of translating “epigraph,” one of the genres I’ve been exploring as I write my Sea of Intimacy. In the process, I’ve come up with some rules to give myself some productive constraints.

The constraints, I’m feeling, are needed because they — epigraphs, that is — are a little too fun to just plop in everywhere, playing with sources and time right and left. And I do that a bit, with offerings from, for example, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Plato, Dubravka Ugrešić, Jacques Derrida, Claudio Magris, Rachel Carson, Ligio Zanini, Robert MacFarlane, Jesse Jackson, Fulvio Tomizza, Tomaž Šalamun, Horace Walpole, and Jan Morris.

And then there’s the fact that the whole book springs, in essence, from a single phrase, which is the first epigraph to the book, Matvejević’s line, which in my case seems to have been something more like a provocation, “The Atlantic and the Pacific are seas of distance, the Mediterranean a sea of propinquity, the Adriatic a sea of intimacy.”

One constraint is that one is enough. This is not an arbitrary standalone principle, let alone a rule. It’s what feels right for this book, and it goes together with the next one, which is that the connection to the writing it accompanies should not be cryptic. (For examples of epigraphs on the cryptic side, see Alexander Pushkin’s prose works.)

I’m recalling that one press where I published something years ago indicated that if you use the material quoted in an epigraph as part of your analysis, commenting on it directly, you have a much better case for “fair use.” The contrast would be just quoting something for artistic effect, or to show off. I don’t know if this rule is still used in terms of copyright fair use guidelines, but it seems a helpful principle and goes with the first one (about only needing one).

In other words, using only one is a form of self-control, while not letting it just set out there all important helps in maintaining focus and providing a little more of something (depth, tone, color, context) for the writing in question.

And then a really essential one, I think: Not every essay needs one.

###