Out Of Nowhere Into Nothing by Caryl Pagel

 Oh, what to make of this book!  The words gush out like an open fire hydrant.  Coincidences, strange occurrences, stories, historical events:  Caryl Pagel, in her book, Out Of Nowhere Into Nothing (FC2/The University of Alabama Press, 2020), links them all together into a seamless world of wonder.  Her prose is dense, full of elliptical clauses and turns of phrase.

For instance, this:  “It had been nearly five years since we’d moved to Ohio for my job, which had since proved a stable but frustrating obstacle to life outside an eighteenth-floor English department located in a towering Brutalist building with skinny sniper windows and the amusing lore of nineteenth-floor flooding and loose asbestos.”  Or this:  “Moving closer, I noticed thousands of multicolored perfect circles the size of a pinkie’s tip arranged in great piles onto unframed stretched canvases creating a liquid, jubilant, multitextured field suggestive, perhaps, of a shag rug, speckled wall, or foamy shoreside ocean swell.”  Most of the essays in this collection have no paragraphs; Pagel fires solid blocks of text at the reader filled with word-joy that is contagious.

The book blurs several lines.  It is memoir, critical analysis, history, literature, and cultural study.  Pagel begins with a mission statement going beyond changing names to protect the guilty.  “This book is interested in memory, accumulating particulars, and retelling a good story,” she writes on the copyright page.  “It is a work of nonfiction and fiction.  Though it includes research and aims for veracity, the narratives ultimately rely on the author’s version of events.  The author has been, and could still be, mistaken.”

Pagel’s style is a bit Joan Didion, with her cool distance and pile-driving prose.  The coincidences, the inexplicable events that seem so fateful, that is Pagel’s métier.   She manages to take the culture’s temperature and illuminate the connections.  In the essay “What Remains To Be Seen,” she blames human beings for environmental carnage.  “Even the deepest floors of the ocean had been tainted by toxic debris,” she writes, “grocery bags, pill bottles, straws, coffee holders, microbeads, tarps, tape, car parts, bottle caps, jacket fibers, carry-out containers, shoes, ghost nets, children’s toys, mattress stuffing, lost balloons, cutlery, shampoo bottles, pylons, oil jugs, and so on.”  It is a resounding indictment of the way we live and the human disregard for our ecosystem.  This results in turtles consuming soap, children with high levels of lead in their blood, opioids in mussels, and “evidence of Fukushima’s nuclear signature…in California wines.”  All of this, including several references to our current leadership, creates an end-of-the-world nightmare.

The most haunting discussion she offers is the unique dream she shares with a boyfriend.  She does not wake to share the dream with her sleeping companion; no, where her dream left off, her boyfriend’s dream began.  Only when they swap dreams in the morning do they realize what has happened.  She dreamed that she was ill with “a disease that caused deep coughs and a spiking fever, a tense chest and numb limbs, and that the diagnosis was fatal.”  In her dreamland, the boyfriend goes to the pharmacy for medicine, but Pagel fears he will be too late and she will die.  A voice disturbs the dream and she begins to awaken.  The voice is her boyfriend, mumbling, “What kind?”  She shakes off the fear ignited by the dream and goes back to sleep.  The next morning, her boyfriend tells her he had a strange dream where he was standing in an aisle at Walgreens, wondering what medicine to buy for her because she was sick.  Pagel calls this “plot transference,” and she remembers still the details of the shared dreaming.  She tells us the trouble begins when we cannot determine “where the dream begins and…waking life ends.”  She utilizes a refrain several times in the book:  “Are we inside or outside?  Are we small or far away.”  She takes us through several dream stories, including one with her somnambulist brother who once was discovered by their father “filling every concave object in our kitchen with tap water…both hard at work and sleeping.”

Pagel’s polymath tendencies make for interesting moments if cross-connection.  She analyzes the burgeoning nineteenth-century fascination with mediums and spiritualism involving investigations by the likes of William James.  She connects this interest to allowing women “to harness their perceptive intellectual authority in a somewhat public setting” inspired by the evolving suffrage movement.  She spends time unpacking and critically examining art and architecture in America.  She writes about photographer Vivian Maier as someone who snapped moments of contemplative thought on the streets of Chicago.  She captures the distractedness of the now:  “I admired the colors, the concept, the plot,” of a work of art, she tells us.  But she also touches her phone to check for new text messages.

Caryl Pagel pulls together a multiverse of stories, facts, photographs, art, and cultural nuances to illuminate the coincidences and accidents that create the scaffolding of our lives.  The final sentence of the book illustrates how we might look back at our lives upon reflection.  Pagel encounters a man at a hotel where she is staying, and they strike up a conversation.  “You know,” he says, “I’ll tell you something.  It was the strangest set of circumstances that brought me here…”  And yet another story begins.