Spotlight On: Matthew Vollmer

Matthew Vollmer’s essay “epitaph 45″ appears in Issue 15 of the magazine. Matthew sat down to answer a handful of questions about the essay and the meaning of orangutans pissing in their own mouths.

Who died?

On one level, a version of myself. On another level, nobody. Yet. The epitaph could be read as one penned for the future occasion of my passing. But that sounds pretentious. Which is why I wrote these in third person. I needed distance. I needed not to say “I” or “my.”

Who do you imagine wrote the epitaph?

A recording angel.

I’m intrigued by epitaphs. What made you decide to write these, and only in one long sentence?

I started writing epitaphs sometime last spring. I can’t even remember why or where the idea came from. But I was immediately drawn to some of the tensions between conventional epitaphs (which are short and pithy and frequently attempt to describe, in elevated language, the best version of the person who is now dead) and my own, which go on and on and focus on specific anecdotes or particular observations, and often catalogue the speaker’s anxieties, obsessions, and shortcomings.

To answer the second part of your question, it’s pretty simple: I’m a huge fan of long sentences. I enjoy reading a sentence that seems afraid of what will happen when it reaches a period. And, more often than not, a long sentence seems more capable of capturing the epic thought-stream that is human consciousness. (Not that we actually think in sentences. At least I don’t.) A long sentence, deployed properly (see the work of Jose Saramago and Thomas Bernhard), is an event–a comet made of language.

As I’ve pointed out, the conventional epitaph is usually compressed, and often not even a full sentence (after all, it has to fit on a tombstone), and so writing a long-winded epitaph — one that could be two to three to five pages long — is clearly absurd. And so, this defying of sense and convention, I think, ends up generating a certain amount of structural tension, which, I think, is essential. But it also poses unique challenges to me as a writer: make this all one thing, keep it connected, make it work. Which means I have to ask questions like: How do I begin the sentence? How do I sustain it? How can I employ (and avoid) repetition? How can I ensure that the rhythm of the piece maintains its integrity? And how the heck am I supposed to end this thing?

What is the deceased’s conflict with “… staring into screens watching fat guys lip synch to Moldavian songs and busty babes biting their lips and orangutans peeing into their own mouths?”

I guess there I’m trying to capture the absurdity of what it’s like to surf the internet — i.e., to own this super-powerful machine (one that would have been impossible to conceive of in my youth) that allows a person unlimited access to knowledge and information, but which the user, more often than not often pilots into the realms of utter superficiality and base humor. Also, this particular epitaph is, in part, an elegy for the deceased’s son’s youth. And the epiphany here, I guess, is that the speaker’s realizing that he’s probably spent more time with this machine than his own son, which then snowballs into a list of all the things he should have or could have been doing, had he been a more responsible father.

Also, I wrote this after having a realization of my own: that of what my son is most likely to remember about me, when he thinks of what I do for work. I imagine most people have memories of trying to get their parents’ attention. If I think about this, I remember my mom in the kitchen, saying, “Just a minute.” I remember my father stacking or cutting wood, or leaning over the head of one of his dental patients. So what will my son remember about his mother and me, two people who are both writers and educators? That we spent a LOT of time staring into our machines.

Is everybody in the 21st century neurotic and conflicted like the deceased?

Neurotic? Probably. Conflicted? I dunno. I think most people are too oppressed to feel all that conflicted. Feeling conflicted, now that I think about it, is probably some kind of luxury.