the millions

8/9/2019 The Millions

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THE MILLIONS

How Do I Get Home? A Profile of Nick Flynn

By Rebecca Keith, 5 feb 2010

When Nick Flynn drives around his hometown, Scituate,Massachusetts, he inevitably passes the houses he lived in with his mother andbrothersix of them within the first five years of his life. In the past few decades,unsurprisingly, money has been pumped into Scituate, a small coastal city, butamid the explosion of seaside wealth, every house Flynn lived in looks worse for

the wear. Theyre all still there, he tells me, sort of falling apart, with the samepaint I painted on them just peeling off in sheets. Its an image that could belifted straight from a dreamor one of his poems in Some Ether, or a chapter ofone of his memoirs, Another Bullshit Night in Suck Cityor the newly publishedThe Ticking is the Bomb. These ghost-houses are emblematic of Flynns

writinghomes slowly being erased, shadowed, built on shaky foundations ornone at all, people and places eroding. I imagine Cape Cod-blue houses, freshly

painted, or creamy McMansions next to the scattered avocado green, tan, fadingyellow of Flynns childhood homes. I ask if he ever knocked on the door of any ofthe houses; he says he went into one years ago, but hasnt since. Theres no

pitbulls in the yard, but theres something sort of up, like troubled people live inthese houses. Its really strange. Its not like the whole town went into disrepair.Its just the places we lived in.

In the past decade, Flynn has lived in Rome, Dar es Salaam, and divided his time

(as writers

bios are wont to say) between teaching at the University of Houstonand living in New York, either in Brooklyn or his house upstate. Fluidity of homeand identity carries through Flynns writing. In The Ticking is the Bomb, Flynnwrites about buying his house upstate several years ago. My natural bornrestlessness only seemed to grow the more days I spent there. Rooted? I endedup staying in the house only to work on it, and then I d leave I moved aroundmore those first two years of owning a house than I ever hadI was vapor, I wasair, I was nowhere.

The Ticking is the Bomb is a process-oriented memoirin short, about thetorture condoned by the U.S. government in recent years, juxtaposed with Flynn

readying himself to become a father. Dated (but not chronological) vignettes mixwith surreal extended metaphors which, while part of the narrative, I had a hardtime convincing myself were not prose poems. This book could have beenpoetry, Flynn says. The first pieces Flynn wrote, before he knew he was writing

his next memoir, were four long poems; they remained in the book up until its lastedit. Flynn says the poems became four pillars, scaffolding, that the whole bookwas built around. Then I took them away and the book was there. (The poems


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will appear in Flynns next collection, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, outlater this year from Graywolf.)

The Ticking is the Bombopens with a sonogram of Flynns unborn daughteradream sleeping inside the body of the woman I love and shifts rapidly to another

set of photographs one of which Flynn describes plainly as depicting a nakedman being dragged by a soldier out of a cell on the end of a leash. These otherphotos, Flynn writes, also have the texture of dreamsshadowy, diaphanous,changeable. In 2004, like most of us, Flynn heard of Abu Ghraib for the first

time; he didnt know if it was one word or two, a building or a city, a place or anidea. In the course of the next few years, he became part of a handful of what hecalls torture people and traveled to Istanbul to meet some of the men victimizedby American soldiers. At the same time, he was slowly extricating himself fromone relationship with a woman while falling in love with his future partner andmother of his child, the actress, Lili Taylor (called Inez in the book). Flynn says,I began looking at torture without really recognizing that I was also enacting

some kind of darker impulses myself. As I pushed into it, I realized there wereechoes of the larger culture in my life. Not to make any equivalents to them, atall. But certain brutalization or suffering thats being sowed.

As immensely personal as The Ticking is the Bomb is, it pushes readers toacknowledge, if not meditate on, the urges lurking inside us, those we tamp down

in order to continue, to resist the impulses (conscious or not) to hurt ourselves,the ones we love, even those we dont. As Flynn comes to understand what heswriting about, within the book, he says, Maybe I should tell anyone who asksthat Im writing about Proteus, the mythological creature who changes shape as

you hold onto him, who changes into the shape of that which most terrifies you,as you ask him your question, as you refuse to let go. The question is, often,simply a variation of, How do I get home? This is a book full of shape-shiftingand slow alterations of character. How do you face other Americans who find theinhumane treatment of people acceptable and even justified? How do you look ata man who says the soldiers who made him stand on a box, hooded, resemble

you? How do you transform into a parent after passing the age at which yourparents imploded? How do learn to let go of love that is unhealthy?

As I prepare to meet Flynn to discuss The Ticking is the Bomb, I try to separatequestions into thematic areas, but they fold in on each other, along with images

from the book. There is a photograph of Flynns mother holding a can of Schlitz,wearing a blond wig and sunglasses the Grifters photo he calls it; his fathersapartment, stacked to the ceiling with newspapers; a monkey sculpted out oflava; a torture pose once called The Vietnam, now called The Statue ofLiberty; twenty year-old Flynn splitting open cut straws found in his mother sglove compartment, licking out cocaine residue; Flynn bending down to his wifesbelly, two days after their daughters due date, murmuring, Were waiting for you,little one, the coast is clear. In another meta-passage of the book, Flynn writes,


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Sometimes Ill say Im writing a memoir of bewilderment, and just leave it at that,but what I mean is the bewilderment of waking up, my hand on Inezs belly, as

the fine points of waterboarding are debated on public radio.

I meet Flynn one evening in January at a cafe in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, where he

lives now, with Taylor and their nearly two year-old daughter. Known as more ofa brunch spot, the place feels like a B&B dining room or perfect grandma scountry kitchen. I order a chicken pot pie. Flynn, who eats early these days withhis daughter, has a pot of tea. As Dionne Warwick sings, I say a little prayer for

you, through the speakers, I ask Flynn if he wants to talk about torture first orfatherhood? In interviews for The Ticking is the Bomb, he tells me, some peopledont want to talk about torture at all; others onlywant to talk about it. I give themornings to torture and the afternoons are for love, he jokes. Early on in thebook, he writes, Maybe talking about torture is easier than talking about myimpending fatherhood. I take out the book to rifle through my notes, and Flynnreaches for it, like a kid. He sings the praises of Kapo Ng, the artist who

designed the covers of both his memoirs. You give him the book, and then like aweek later he comes back with the cover and nothing changes.

As Flynn thumbs through the book, my notes on Proteus fall out. Flynn says hegot Proteus from Stanley Kunitz, calls the sea god a poets archetype. Heworries, You have to be careful of the archetypes you embrace. Our culture

embraces Prometheus, which is the same thing as Adam and Eve. He getspunished for knowledge. I never quite understood why we are punished forknowledge. Both Prometheus and Proteus are symbolically present in one of myfavorite passages in The Ticking is the Bomb, Lava. Flynn writes of the months

following a volcanos eruption, lava slowly moving towards a village: Someargued that it was better than a flood, better than a firelava gives you time to

move out what you most value. I had the idea that the only option would be touproot your house and put it on a raft and float it to the next island. Proteus is adistinctly Flynn archetype, even reflected by the loose form of his memoirs.

Growing up in Scituate, he tells me, Everything was damp all the time. You couldsmell the ocean. His father claims that his grandfather invented the life raft.Flynn once lived on a boat; in The Ticking is the Bombhe writes, My twenties,you could say, were water, you could say I was, in a way, more ocean than earth.You could say that whatever was solid in me was slowly dissolving. Where Flynn

lives now, in Brooklyn, he is still close to the water. In the mornings andevenings, if the traffics not too loud on a particular street, you can hear shiphorns as they pass through the harbor. At a recent reading, he shared a poemcalled Kedge, (a method of anchoring a ship). Another poem, haiku (failed)echoes Goodnight Moonbut with a nautical edge, with the lines: bye-bye/ boat,bye-bye rain, beating, our bodies the bottle, a ship inside each, and here it isstill, your heart, is it well/ well welling?


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Flynn is indeed a mutable a character in The Ticking is the Bomb, split betweentwo women and briefly returning to substance abuse after years of sobriety. A

woman who refuses to have coffee with Flynn, because she is married, tells him,Two dogs live inside me, and the one I feed is the one that will grow. He isdrawn into a relationship with a woman he calls Anna, who shares some of the

same dark impulses that run through his family. In the midst of severing ties withher, Flynn admits, When I was with her I felt known, perhaps for the firsttimeThose rooms we shared became a space in which to reveal a darkness Icarried inside me, a heaviness that needed to be dragged into the light, or itwould sink me.

Where Flynns character shifts forms, his partner, Inez, is a solid force. If Flynn swriting werent such a kick in the pants, this could come across as the old youmake me want to be a better man shtick, but instead he gives us passages likethis:

When I turn away from the book, Inez is there, radiantly pregnant,seemingly more sure of whats to come, and this calms me. Thebaby is, after all, inside her, inside her bodyperhaps this makes itmore real, for her. But then, Inez has always been this waycertain, or at least seemingly so. It confused me when we first gottogether, for it seemed that whether I was to stay or go she would

be alright, that she would survive. When we were first together Ihad to face the uncomfortable realization that I wasnt used tocalling love something that didnt involve disaster.

Flynn evokes Elizabeth Bishops familiar words in One Art: the art of losing

snot too hard to master/ though it may look like, (Write it!) like disaster. As he

struggles to latch on, open up to a stable relationship, he makes new the poets old favorite, loss.

On their first date, Flynn and Inez talk about having children. In a passage called,The Tricky Part, he writes,

We werent asking each other if we could imagine having childrenwith each other, but we werent not asking that either. For years Idtold myself that I could live anywhere, for a year or two. Some

part of me did this with women as well imagined a new woman asa city I could stay in for a while, then visit from time to time. Id knowmy way around, I wouldnt need a map, but I wouldnt really live

there either. But a child? A child wasnt like a city, or even awoman. I couldnt simply visit now and then.

Flynn navigates this murky water through his elegant language, trying not to

blame the map [he was] given for his apprehension. This is not a book of


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blame, but one of understanding how images and words are manipulated, inpersonal relationships or in a larger scope. After the Abu Ghraib photographs are

leaked, Flynn listens to the U.S. governments malevolent poets deny what thephotos show, twisting language to map their own agenda. Donald Rumsfeldsays he is not going to address the torture word. Flynn hears victims of torture

use words to describe how their bodies were manipulated; looking at photos ofhimself, a man called Amir says, I do not believe it was me that was there.

Of the sonogram image of his daughter from 2007, Flynn writes, I was there

when each shot was taken, yet in some ways, still, it is all deeply unreal. Sincethen, nursery rhyme language has crept into some of his recent poetry. He hasseen every sunrise for two years as he wakes with his daughter, a time heconsiders meditation. Im preparing food for her, making tea, sitting and readinga book to her. Its not a sitting meditation, but the attention is there, he says. Inthe opening passage of The Ticking is the Bomb, Flynn writes that he hopes tobe able to explain the dark time of our country to his daughter as a story in the

past. We got lost for a while, this story will begin, but then we found our way.

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