'They Contain the Original Ichor'

“In any case, reading is merely the first step to rereading.”

 

At last, someone has said what I have always known but never articulated. Most books made to be read once probably shouldn’t be read the first time. Reading is culling. That’s how we sift out the books we never wish to read again. As Nabokov puts it in “Good Readers and Good Writers,” his introduction to Lectures on Literature (1980): “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”

 

One of my favorite living writers of prose is the poet Kay Ryan. Her tone is distinctive, a sort of dry, sophisticated whimsy. Whimsy is dreadful when it’s a lobotomized hippie affectation, unseemly childishness in an adult who ought to know better. Think Richard Brautigan. Ryan is ever the grownup. Her prose and poems recall Marianne Moore’s. She isn’t afraid to see silliness and wonder in her surroundings and within herself. The passage quoted at the top is from “Reading Before Breakfast,” collected in Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose (Grove Press, 2020). It’s not the first piece in the book but it was the first I read, mostly because of the title. And in her third paragraph she mentions Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature. She likens rereading to “our most picturesque images of creation and transformation.” Typically, she uses a scientific analogy:

 

“[I]magine a glass filled with a supersaturate solution; if you give it a tap, it could turn to crystals. Rereading is like these mysteries. Open to a paragraph or even a line and—tap!—the complete composition precipitates. I never ‘acquire’ these books. It is maddening, but I can never remember books, especially my favorite ones. I don’t like them to come up in conversation. But if I reread a line, then it is all around me again, my real landscape, my real feelings, all familiar. Where have I been?”

 

In explanation of her title, Ryan means the books she reads first thing in the morning, before she starts writing. It is only then, she says, that she can “bear them”: “I go to these writers because they contain the original ichor.” For the Greeks, ichor is the ethereal fluid flowing through the veins of the gods. We might think of it as a divine energy drink—Monster for immortals. She cites an interesting assortment of writers and books: Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed, Martin Buber’s The Legend of the Baal-Shem, William Bronk’s Vectors and Smoothable Curves. “I notice that most of my morning books,” she writes, “are by poets and novelists—but their essays rather than their poetry or novels.”  Which is precisely the category of book we are reading by Ryan. She approvingly closes her brief essay with lines from Auden’s essay collection The Dyer’s Hand:

 

“Occasionally I come across a book which I feel  has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anyone else to hear of it.”