{"id":43315,"date":"2019-03-10T14:51:23","date_gmt":"2019-03-10T20:51:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=43315"},"modified":"2019-03-12T01:23:27","modified_gmt":"2019-03-12T07:23:27","slug":"the-imagination-of-history-and-gender-in-katharine-coles-look-both-ways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/the-imagination-of-history-and-gender-in-katharine-coles-look-both-ways\/","title":{"rendered":"The Imagination of History and Gender in Katharine Coles’ Look Both Ways"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

After finishing\u00a0Look Both Ways, <\/em>I found myself recommending it to friends based on its ability to cause me to rethink imagination, history, and gender.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an imaginative book, self-imaginative. It\u2019s a biography\/memoir\u00a0by Katharine Coles that centers on her grandmother, Miriam Wollaeger Link, and their respective journeys around the world. At one point in the book, Coles says, \u201cI can only imagine,\u201d as if to imply that\u2019s all we can do with history and even ourselves. She\u2019s the former poet laureate of Utah and a professor of creative writing at the University of Utah, so the book does juxtapose those elements of her life against her grandmother\u2019s own accomplishments, making for an interesting doubling, or, as Coles subtitles the book \u201cA Double Journey Along My Grandmother\u2019s Far-Flung Path.\u201c<\/p>\n

Both Miriam and her husband Walter, Cole\u2019s grandfather, were geologists in 1920s Wisconsin and traveled widely for the oil industry at a time when the demand for \u201cblack gold\u201d was surging. In Cole\u2019s recounting of their lives, she imagines her grandparents\u2019 lives through her own; she imagines the alternative by being<\/em> the alternative. Coles insists that she \u201cwon\u2019t change their story,\u201d but she does imagine a different fate for herself, perhaps suggesting the overwhelming violence of imagination and how we should try to refrain from reimagining others\u2019 fates for them and stick to reimagining their fate by reimagining our own.\u00a0And despite this, she still finds herself comparing herself to her grandmother and asking, \u201c. . . in her place, her time, could I have been braver? With all my freedoms, can I now?\u201d<\/p>\n

There are moments in reading this memoir in which imagination feels like a revolt: Miriam\u2019s imagining against Walter\u2019s imagining, of life and relationship and love. What Coles points out is not just the physical\/social\/economic violence of\/in American marriages like the Links\u2019, but also the imaginative (metaphysical?) violence of such relationships. At other times, imagination feels like resistance: if one could not actually resist, then at least the imaginations and hopes we hold are and can be enough. I\u2019m more willing to believe this by how, toward its conclusion, Coles dovetails her book with the #MeToo movement and other contemporary feminist solidarities.<\/p>\n

At another point Coles even suggests much of contemporary sexism is the result of myopia: \u201c[My grandfather] never could have imagined,\u201d she writes. She argues that many of the resolutions we seek will be had by testing out new methods until our imaginations, made practical by analyses tested by adventures, produce actual solutions. Amid these attempts, she asks, \u201c[A]m I progress?\u201d Insistent not to carry on remiss traditions \u2014 not to make the same mistakes of the past, not to repeat history \u2014 Coles searches\/condenses history and takes the anxieties of history on both imaginative and physical journeys to reimagine the present into a better or at least more clarified future. Look Both Ways<\/em> is an epic on how imagination both prepares and causes a history to unfold. It offers the juxtapositions of imagining something before, imagining something during, and imagining something after, ultimately demanding that we ask ourselves what difference each of these imaginations has on\/in our history.<\/p>\n

I found myself asking these questions about imagination at least partly because of how opaque the book is (and I mean this in a celebratory manner). Mostly the opacity is of the sort that causes one to be self-reflective, of the sort that turns the self back to the self. Coles herself calls her grandmother\u2019s history \u201ca window and a mirror,\u201d and if you are looking for a window and a mirror, or if you are looking for the sensation of looking out the window as you sail into\/out-of\/from the harbors of life, then you will experience that here in this book. You will experience a window half-glazed in light, with enough light on the outside to see outside (the self), and with enough light on the inside to see yourself looking. In this way, the book oscillates (as the daylight does) with interior, illuminating meditations by Coles that reveal us to us, ourselves, and just enough transparency for us to see what she is pointing at in her stories and images and adventures.<\/p>\n

The text does not lead you by the hand, but leaves you to your own designs, your own reflection, captivated but free (much like, dare I say, traditional concepts and practices of marriage leave us). Miriam\u2019s condition often seems to be the general human condition, held captive by life, a paradoxically limited freedom: To be; but what? To do; but how? To move; but where?<\/p>\n

The resolutions are indistinct, even impossible, something one must come to terms with \u2014 both in the book and in life \u2014 if only by constantly imagining resolutions. But I am (as I imagine Coles, her grandparents, and all of us are) uncertain. Concerning her grandmother, Coles says, \u201cfirst uncertainty wore on her, then certainty,\u201d and I couldn\u2019t help but feel that the author included this because she had felt this herself, and I won\u2019t protest to the suggestion that I also mention it because I, too, have felt this way.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it is all right, as the text suggests, to have initial intentions that are allowed to transform: to take the \u201cI am\u201d in love and transform it into an \u201cI will\u201d marry you. But then I feel this weariness and anxiety: How can we take the \u201cI am\u201d of being and metamorphose it into an \u201cI will\u201d? How can being ever coalesce properly with becoming? How can we ever do this, how can we ever commit to a future we do not know?<\/p>\n

I find myself recommending this book, also, based on how it addresses history, how Coles\u2019 writing is a double journey, how her two-histories-toned sentences suggest that history is always by our side, impacting our lives. Even the title,\u00a0Look Both Ways,\u00a0<\/em>is both\u00a0<\/em>a word of caution, and also an encouragement to look more, to see more, to experience more: looking as both a self-pleasure and as a self-preservation.<\/p>\n

Coles makes all of this looking more obvious in the way she has structured the book as a comparative history had by journey \u2014 her dangers in modernity as a traveling poet, her grandmother\u2019s dangers as a scientist in the past. She has created the book in a way that doesn\u2019t just put her story in the same narrative as her grandmother\u2019s, but gets them speaking side by side in a sentence. She has taken on the herculean task of trying to take a large personal history and reduce it to its most essential and entertaining parts, parts that include her. By this, I see her suggesting that we are (or at least should be?) the future that wants to see the past again (be next to it, be close to it), that there are some futures that want to replace the past and others that want to preserve them: \u201cawaiting a future that wants to see [the past] again.\u201d<\/p>\n

This book is just that, a historical approach, a way of approaching history, a way of walking into an antique store, into a stack of diaries. (The book, in fact, is based on diaries and papers written by Coles\u2019 grandmother and rescued from what appeared to be pending disposal.) There are so many ways in which we could do this, and Coles offers one. She fleshes out the dead, while trying not to flush them out. She reads her own history and declares she won\u2019t change it. She reveals how she is chilled by her history, and I also am chilled.<\/p>\n

This perhaps is why this book is important; because we have to ask ourselves who is responsible for interpreting love and relationship, gender and responsibility; because the book asks in a very real way (by narrative, history, form, content, text, etc.) who<\/em> is responsible; because I am asked, as a reader (and a male one at that) to take the risk of reviewing myself (i.e. making a review myself, and revealing myself), the risk of passing a judgment, the risk of making a statement (or restatement to myself and others) and be so chilled.<\/p>\n

Coles, herself, has done this. She has sat down and written this book, taken risks, made assumptions, made guesses, all the while trying to avoid overly doing so. She feels compelled to do a thing she should be careful of doing, and then does it and tries to find justification in the doing of it while she does it. She tries to explain it as it happens, tries to understand her grandparents, tries to help her partner understand her own adventures.<\/p>\n

Katharine Coles tries so many things in Look Both Ways<\/em>. She tries for so many adventures, possibilities, solutions, questions. The past, invisible to us, converges (maybe fortunately, maybe unfortunately) with the present imagined moment and even with the offing. Should we hold them apart? No.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Look Both Ways: A Double Journey Along My Grandmother’s Far-Flung Path (Paperback)<\/a>
\nby Katharine Coles
\nTurtle Point Press (November, 2018)
\n304 pp
\n$18.95<\/p>\n

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After finishing\u00a0Look Both Ways, I found myself recommending it to friends based on its ability to cause me to rethink imagination, history, and gender. It\u2019s an imaginative book, self-imaginative. It\u2019s a biography\/memoir\u00a0by Katharine Coles that centers on her grandmother, Miriam Wollaeger Link, and their respective journeys around the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1586,"featured_media":43318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[1294],"class_list":["post-43315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-katharine-coles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/Look-Both-Ways-Cover.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-25 15:36:25","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1586"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43315"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43329,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43315\/revisions\/43329"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}