The Blurb Artist
By Carolyn Cooke
Starborne: The Journal of Autocosmology, Issue 1, can be read in full at the above link. Each individual contribution will be shared here as well, one every week.
The Blurb Artist
by Carolyn Cooke
The blurb artist’s job is simple: to open the book for a reader like a scalpel to the chest. She commits to an entanglement from which recovery might be impossible and reports back in the precise form of a blurb. Blurbing is an art of essence. A good blurb artist can capture hundreds of pages of soaring genius in a sentence, two words—or even one. The question for the blurb artist is not, What do you think? The question is, Will you blurb?
The blurb artist unwrapped the advance copy and held it—weighty, but not heavy—in her hands. The violet-hued cover bled into a deeper shade toward the bottom, suggesting the gravitas of the author’s subject: the evolving intelligence of the universe over fourteen billion years, and the metaphysical dimension associated with purple. Machine-generated stars sparkled across the title, the subtitle, the author’s name, and a reference to one of the author’s earlier, best-selling books.
The blurb artist felt honored to be asked to blurb a book about the universe. Her zone of expertise wasn’t physics, philosophy, theology, geology, or anything grounded in what might be called fundamental truth or reality. Her zone of expertise lay in the opposite of disciplinary mastery: in not-knowing. The not-knowing formed a container, an open space in which the blurb artist experienced the work in its pure form, as the author intended, or even beyond what the author intended.
Blurbing is an art of distillation that requires both emptiness and readiness. This paradox—empty readiness—is essential to the experience, otherwise the blurb artist won’t have the capacity to be filled with new content, to be revised by the experience of the book. The blurb artist can’t just go in as if the book were a door. The book is not a door; it’s a billowing slot. The blurb artist enters sideways, as one enters a whirling jump-rope.
The blurb artist set the author’s book, a glass of water, a yellow legal pad, and a pen on her worktable. She’d have no memory, when she returned from her journey, of having made the notes that filled the pages and she’d never look at the notes again. Because blurbs were not made of notes—they came. Like orgasms, like lightning. The notes were essential, though, as a record of the physicality of the blurb artist’s labor, her manual struggle for understanding.
During her preparations the blurb artist became aware of a young deer, a buck, browsing in the meadow outside her work room. Velvet parentheses of bone rose from the buck’s brow; he might have been the fawn from last year who’d lived in the forest with his mother. The buck seemed at home. Why shouldn’t he? Probably he was born nearby, in a bed of redwood fronds and pine needles.
The buck watched the blurb artist through the window as he ruminated on tough meadow grass. The blurb artist tried not to reveal her excitement at being so close to wild nature and ignored the buck so he might stay. She stretched her arms overhead, shook out her hands, and rubbed them together until the palms warmed. Then she opened the book, closed her eyes, and began to read.
At first it was as if she skated across a frozen sea. This is the challenge, isn’t it, of entering another consciousness? The blurb artist was humbled, too, by the author’s command of science, mathematics, and philosophy—from the cosmic microwave background radiation that was born with the universe to the various human players on the evolutionary stage. (Pythagoras, for example, apparently realized that the universe was orderly and mathematical, but had no mathematics to explain and understand itself. Pythagoras was, in this sense, the original blurb artist. He came up with the language—a math—that evoked the infinite text of the universe.)
Suddenly the frozen sea cracked, plunging the blurb artist into the depths. The terror was familiar, yet the blurb artist had never gotten used to the effort it took not to panic and claw her way back up to the shattered surface, but instead to sink down until the water warmed a little and new life appeared. For example, the blurb artist herself took on a new form, as a gilled, flat fish—a fluke—with fins top and bottom like the fringe around a carpet, and both eyes on one side of her head, facing up. One eye observed the vastness described by the author, who drew in Aristotle, Ptolemy, Dante, Hildegard of Bingen, Copernicus, Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Hubble, and a triad of three-named philosophers: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred North Whitehead, and Charles Sanders Peirce. The other eye remained alert for a fragment of the unsayable totality that might be broken off and forged into a blurb.
The task of the blurb artist can be summed up in two sentences: Identify the source of human light. Then get out. There’s a poem—Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”—that reads like a manifesto for blurb artists. It begins with a headless torso so suffused with light that it functions expressively like a head, like a lamp, Rilke says, which is how the blurb artist liked to think of the author, as a lamp that illuminated humanity. Life bursts forth from the human “like a star,” says Rilke, “for here there is no place that does not see you.” This is the moment the blurb artist lives for: when, hovering almost motionless in the mind of the author, she is at once less herself, and more. The chilling last sentence—“You must change your life”—comes from everywhere and nowhere like a tide. It is the true text of every blurb.
At noon the blurb artist surfaced for a training on the new system that had replaced the old system at the university where she taught “Reading As If Your Life Depends On It” and “Art Of The Blurb.” Rising from the submarine layer of the author’s mind into her work room, the blurb artist saw the buck again. He lay in the grass just outside the window, resting, she imagined, while he grew his rack and prepared to fight and mate. The buck didn’t need to think about that future. He could trust that the desire and ability to fight and mate would flow into him when he needed it. Fighting and mating were part of him, but the knowledge was stored, for the time being, outside of his personal consciousness. It was more practical to save the energy he’d otherwise spend in practice-fighting and rutting (flirting? developing an ego?) in growing the largest, strongest rack possible. The rack was the key to the kingdom of fighting and mating.
As he lay in the meadow growing his antlers, the buck’s black eyes were full of the experience of transforming from a fawn into a buck. The great question hung in the air, but unspoken, of course—because the buck had no words. The blurb artist imagined that one day he was a fawn following his mother around a delicious meadow, and then he woke from the dream of his life into a violent instant in which his instincts told him, run! He ran before he knew, before the event for which the entire history of his species had prepared him, happened. Anxiety, he now understood, was a hint, a vibrational skill.
Yet a wild animal had never appeared to the blurb artist as relaxed as the buck in the meadow, perfectly secure in his vulnerability.
Fortunately, the training was online, so the blurb artist didn’t need to drive to campus, find parking, or make small talk, any of which could fatally interfere with the poetic, sonic, and almost unconscious gestation of the blurb. Still, the training ripped her from reverie and thrust her unceremoniously into, of all things, a project management tutorial.
The trainer seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the all-new menu of options which, once you got used to them, weren’t even that complicated, he promised. You could now do everything within the system. Remember the old way, when you wanted to talk to someone, you had to leave the system and use another device? Now you could make contact right from the app. You could immediately convene a group on an open channel, or you could lock a channel and send an invite to anyone you wanted, and they’d get an immediate notification. You’d also be notified immediately every time someone submitted a task for review.
The blurb artist’s soul raged at spending the gold of her attention on learning a new system. Wasn’t the old system still pretty new? She tried to keep an open mind out of respect for the trainer, who was just doing his job. Besides, the last thing the blurb artist wanted to do was cling to an outdated framework out of fear, like the idiots (not the author’s exact words, though the blurb artist felt his contempt) who called Copernicus a heretic in 1543 for claiming that the Earth orbited the sun rather than being the fixed center of the universe. Who wanted to be like that?
Here's how it works, the trainer explained. You create a task, or you create multiple tasks and assign them to one bucket, or you spread them across multiple buckets depending on whether the tasks are coded by color, by team, or by progress. So—for example—you have a bucket called “new tasks.” The next bucket is “tasks in progress.” The third bucket is “submit task for review.” The fourth bucket is “progress feedback,” then “task submitted for approval,” then, finally, if the task is approved, “task completed.”
What if the task isn’t approved? someone asked anxiously.
Good question, said the trainer. Then the task gets kicked back to the “in progress” bucket with notes on next steps. Make sense?
It made no sense! Why put a “task” into a “bucket” as if the desktop were a farm where everyone works with their hands and not just their fingers and thumbs? The endless cycling through “buckets” seemed especially small and sad.
Someone asked how the new system bypassed the internal protocols with their built-in multi-factor security. The trainer answered, I’m so, so glad you asked that!
When the training finally ended, the blurb artist wasted no time and plunged back to the floor of the sea where her fluke-self hovered, both eyes facing up, taking in the macrocosm where there could be no false sense of completion, no buckets or tasks. There was only the universe—the book—and then the microcosm of the blurb, whose creation demanded a catharsis, a period of lostness followed by a revelation.
In a frenzy of sympathetic intellection the blurb artist copied whole paragraphs, filling the legal pad with a reproduction of the author’s mind that was identical to the text itself. The notes, perfectly illegible, were never meant to be read; they formed part of an internal system of communication between author and blurb artist—a locked channel.
The revelation came suddenly. All her life up to this moment the blurb artist had been encased in a human agenda, artificially shrunken from her natural size, born into a story that wasn’t even true. Most people had grandiose ideas of what their lives were for, but their ideas were still too small. Now suddenly (like the buck’s budding consciousness that his rack was an aid to fighting and mating, not a weird appendage but his destiny) the blurb artist knew. Her life up to this point had been a relentless, violent compression of vastness. In her urgent desire to be an exponential player on a tiny field, she’d shrunk herself. The work of distillation that gave life meaning had reduced her down to a few dozen remarks she would now do anything to retract—or expand on.
Suddenly the problem of shriveled consciousness came clear: what it means to be too caught up in human concerns. The blurb artist wondered if she could expand her shriveled consciousness by feeding it, like the wild pandemic yeast at the back of the refrigerator with its gray alcoholic hooch floating on the top. Some bakers stir the hooch back in; some drain it away or even drink hooch as an aid to recklessness or courage, which are related forms of sacrifice. As the blurb artist well knew, the courageous sacrifice everything for a purpose, whereas recklessness is the courage of the screwed.
The blurb artist worried, though, that the fierce clarity of the author might be deceptive, like the fierce clarity of hooch. Would this life-changing, shared intelligence fade into a series of unintelligible marks? Could this expansive experience dissipate? What if, after a bender in the mind of the author, the blurb artist woke up with a headache, swollen and unable to compress her findings into the concise mold required? It was important not to be under the influence while writing a blurb, or at least not to hit “send” while drinking exuberantly. On the other hand, hooch could bring the blurb artist closer to her primal fire and expand the space within.
The stakes could not be higher: the blurb artist must find a way to hold the vastness of the universe while at the same time compressing it into an infinitely tiny point. To do both was impossible: she must choose. Just then, the blurb artist’s stomach growled loudly and the buck startled and ran, leaving nothing but a pyramid of shit-pearls in the hard grass and clover.
Impulsively, the blurb artist turned to her computer, clicked through her files, and purged the old blurbs from the new system. She put the blurbs into a bucket, which she named “blurbs,” and swept the bucket into the trash with one finger. She made another bucket called “final blurb.” She would trade all past blurbs for this one. The past blurbs were of no use anyway—a book lives or dies based on its own merits, or on other largely industrial factors—but the process of throwing used blurbs into the trash can at the bottom of her screen and then deleting them felt cathartic. The blurb artist hovered near the bottom of the large, empty feeling and waited. Eventually the lines floated past:
This book will annihilate you. You will never return to your previous stupid contentments.
Not perfect, but a start. A blurb may come, but the necessary refinement can take 100 drafts or more. This blurb-in-progress contained some essence, though. It was facile and hyperbolic—with truth in it.
A notification pinged and the trainer appeared. He was right there, his face, his voice! He’d been there all the time. Hadn’t he mentioned that one could stay in the new system and do everything within it? Isn’t it awesome, the trainer said, like being in a beehive? I see you’re using your buckets, he said. Would you be willing to give feedback on your experience of the training? Just a pithy line or two to help us sell the new system to the laggards.
Of course, said the blurb artist. When do you need it?
Carolyn Cooke is a professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Her books include: Amor & Psycho, Daughters of the Revolution, and The Bostons.
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