Guest Essay: Gayle Brandeis

"Self-storage" is the story of a woman whose habit of buying and reselling storage unit contents sets her on a path of self-discovery inspired by Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," its essential message is all about creativity in its many forms and finding your true path, artistically and otherwise. Author Gayle Gayle Brandeis has written a short essay on that theme:

"When I was in college, I painted the word "Yes" with bleach on the side of my green Converse high tops, the letters luminous against the canvas.

I had fallen in love with the movie A Room with a View that year, and was especially taken by Julian Sands "declaring the universal Yes" as he ran, ecstatic, through a field of wildflowers. "On the other side of the everlasting 'why'," his character's father had said earlier in the film, "there is a 'yes'. And a 'yes' and a 'yes'!" 

I was ready to find that Yes, to declare that Yes, after years of hiding from it, years of being shy, and ill, and scared of the world. My quest for Yes was pretty fragile at first. I walked into a punk store one day, a store I knew I wasn't really cool enough to enter, and the sneering clerk told me I was naïve for only writing Yes on my shoe. 

"You should put No on the other one," he said. "There is no Yes without No. You're denying the dark side of life."

That was true to a certain extent. I have always tended to shrink away from negative emotions, from conflict, from darkness. But my lack of a No sneaker wasn't about that. I wanted to tell him that I was tired of saying No to myself, that in writing only Yes, I was trying to say Yes to life, to all of life, even the "No"s in life, but I was too shy to say anything. I just blushed and slunk out of the store.

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I have been trying to find a way to express "Yes" ever since. In my new novel Self Storage, my character Flan bids on a single box in a locker during a self storage auction—the box, it turns out, is empty except for the word "Yes". This word takes her on a journey to discover what makes her say Yes in her own life.

I was both excited and nervous to make the word Yes so central my novel. Excited because it gave me a chance to play with the word, to try to capture its life affirming fizz. Nervous because I imagined countless punk store clerk clones telling me I was naïve again, foolish. Perhaps it was because of them that I also included a box containing the word No. My character Julia, an artist, puts one box with Yes, one box with No, into different storage lockers and lets them go into lien. Whichever box comes back to her first is supposed to determine whether or not she becomes a Buddhist nun. But even though I acknowledged the word No in the book, the focus is definitely on the word Yes.

I was also nervous because Yes has already been used to such amazing effect in other artist's work. I didn't want to risk comparison to Molly Brown in Ulysses saying famously

      "... and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. " 

Or Yoko Ono's "YES Painting", which was so striking, it made John Lennon fall in love with her. She had placed a white ladder in the center of the Indica Gallery of London; when you climbed up it and peered through the magnifying glass hung from the ceiling, you could read the word "yes" written in teeny tiny letters on a page framed above your head. John Lennon read that word and his heart opened up; he later said "I would have been quite disappointed if it had said 'NO,' but was saved by the fact it said 'YES'." I think Yes has the power to save all of us.

I found I couldn't help but write about the word, even though it had been done so beautifully before. Yes, I reminded myself, is a word that bears repeating. It's a word that doesn't lose its glow, whether it's on a sneaker, or a page, or someone's lips. I want my work, my life, to say Yes to the world. Not the acquiescent "Yes, Ma'am", "Yes, Sir" kind of Yes. A full bodied Yes. A life-embracing Yes. A Yes that acknowledges the wonder of the planet even in the face of war and injustice and intolerance. A Yes offers hope, that shows us both the beauty of what is, and the shimmer of what can be. Yes indeed. Yes I said yes I will Yes."

--Gayle Brandeis
Author of Self Storage (Ballantine, 2007)

Book link

There's a party this weekend in New York and Moleskinerie readers are invited to attend. Details are here.

Comments

[Sarah e. Smith]

I love Gayle Brandeis, her book "Fruitflesh" is at the top of my list and a book that i revisit often. I can't wait to read this new one! Thanks for having her as a guest writer :) I'm so excited!!!

[Sarah e. Smith]

F.Y.I.- the link tot he party info does not work.... :(

[Armand]

Sorry about the bad link. I've fixed it.

[Lohr]

I must look for the novel. The little essay makes the book sound most intriguing...

[Claudia]

Gayle is so yes affirming. Congratulations on your success.

It's Molly Bloom..........