In On Lighthouses, part memoir and part catalog, Mexican writer Jazmina Barrera has found a way to showcase the lifetime of facts she has collected — the places she has visited, books she has read and art she has observed – all on the subject of lighthouses. The book shares shelf space with The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, Nathalie Leger’s Suite for Barbara Loden, and even Eric Plamondon’s strange 1984 trilogy — writers who take deep dives into narrow topics in order to explore wider truths about themselves and the world they inhabit.
On Lighthouses is divided into six parts, each taking its name from a lighthouse Barrera has visited. The better part of 174 pages is devoted to describing these visits in painstaking detail, though it is not immediately clear what her fixation on the structures represents. When looked at individually or together, these journeys appear to have no greater significance other than their having occurred. It is only when she segues into the topic of collecting that we come to understand that Barrera “collects” lighthouses as a way to escape from feelings of isolation and loneliness. Some significance might be gleaned from the fact that most of her stories about lighthouse keepers focus on their desolation and seclusion, their refuge in reading, and their frequent descents into alcoholism and/or lunacy. One senses a connection … or at the very least, that one is meant to sense a connection. Barrera sees herself as isolated on an island, even if that island is Manhattan. She diverts the reader with stories about Jonathan Franzen scattering David Foster Wallace’s ashes, and characters from Edgar Allen Poe and Virginia Woolf. She leaves only dim traces of herself behind in the writing. When she reveals something substantial, it is as a fleeting aside. She moves on quickly, before the reader can examine what she has said too closely. Yet surprisingly, her method succeeds. She writes:
If I concentrate hard on myself, I hurt. For instance, right now, as I write this. By contrast, when I visit lighthouses, when I read or write about lighthouses, I leave myself behind. Some people like gazing into wells. That gives me vertigo. But with lighthouses, I stop thinking about myself. I move through space to remote places. I also move through time, toward a past that I’m aware I idealize, when solitude was easier. And in moving back in time I distance myself from the tastes of my own age, wen lighthouses are linked with unfashionable adjectives like romantic and sublime. It’s difficult to talk about the topics generally associated with lighthouses: solitude, madness. Those of us who try have no option but to accept ourselves as quaint.
Her lighthouse-centric ramblings are fascinating. That is, of course, the point. Is there a more romantic architectural edifice than a lighthouse tower and all it may signify? And yet, Barrera resists the urge to romanticize. She banishes the image of the bearded hermit, with his pipe and cable knit sweater, contentedly sipping from a steaming mug of tea while the BBC’s nightly shipping forecast plays in the background. In the examples given, the lot of the solitary lighthouse keeper is not a pleasant one. The outcome is misanthropy and madness. Add another person and life imitates art. Specifically, Sartre’s No Exit.
In her attempts to distract herself and her readers, Barrera takes us all the way back to the Alexander the Great and the Pharos of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. She touches on the writers I’ve already mentioned, as well as Ray Bradbury, Sir Walter Scott, Melville, Jules Verne, Jeanette Winterson, and so many others that they merit a small bibliography at the end of the volume. She talks about the invention of the Fresnal lens and Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather, who engineered lighthouses. She cites interviews with lighthouse keepers and their children, some she’s read and a few she’s casually conducted herself when the opportunity presented. Her visit to Blackwell Lighthouse on Roosevelt Island, “the island of the island, the stronghold of the excluded: lunatics, the sick, criminals, and lighthouse keepers,” stands out. She hadn’t realized until after she had arrived that this place, located in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, was home to prisons, hospitals, and asylums. She doesn’t mention that until 1973 it was known as Welfare Island or that these days, like many other places in New York City, it has been thoroughly gentrified. A picturesque tramway connects it to Manhattan. Cornell University has a residence there – at the time of its construction, the largest passive solar house in the country. Hilary Clinton announced her 2016 run for the presidency in Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park. “All scenarios associated with the lighthouse are liminal,” she says.
Barrera’s tight focus provides the binding that holds her book together. The writing itself is characterized by clipped passages and abrupt transitions – not unlike the staccato flashes of light, the unique blink patterns emitted by individual lighthouses. “Yaquina Head Lighthouse … Blink pattern: two seconds on, two seconds off, two seconds on, fourteen seconds off.” I’m not sure if Barrera’s own staccato pattern is intentional. But how could it not be? Christina MacSweeney anchors her translation in adept prose,, sensing Barrera’s aversion to florid language. The emotional weight is conveyed in the author’s omissions, the negative spaces created by what is withheld:
I check the temperature every day, and am constantly finding new manifestations of winter that I don’t know how to classify. I’ve discovered that it’s less cold when it snows; sunny days are windy, and there is something called the “wind-chill factor” that makes the chill even chillier. I can’t imagine how that happens. I’ve also discovered sleet, a miserable cold fluid, much more bothersome than simple rain or snow. I know that the days following a snowstorm are the worst: the snow gets slushy, and muddy puddles form at the corners. I still can’t estimate the depth of those puddles, and I move around the streets with less elegance than usual.
We understand she is in a bad place, but how bad is difficult to determine. Especially in these strange days when everything has suddenly become all too relative.
On Lighthouses borrows significance in the time of COVID 19. One may identify with lighthouse keepers as we isolate and practice social distancing in our metaphorical towers. Keeping our minds and hands busy with baking, reading, and sewing masks until the storm passes. Some of us in more — and some less — comfortable circumstances than others. We want to imagine ourselves as having purpose but, outside of our essential and healthcare workers, we would be (as I believe Barrera herself is) mistaken. We want to believe we are in a position of safety.
The truth is that we are on the ships lost at sea, surrounded by rain and fog and terrified of crashing onto the rocks we know are there but can’t see. Sailors desperately looking for the beam of light cutting through the darkness. Listening for the blast of the foghorn. Searching for evidence that there is someone out there, standing watch, ready to guide us back to safe waters.
[Published by Two Lines Press on May 12, 2020, 192 pages, $19.95 hardcover. To acquire a copy from Bookshop.org, click here]
Jazmine Barrera was born in Mexico City in 1988. With the support of a Fulbright grant, she obtained a Masters degree in creative writing from New York University. She is editor and cofounder of Ediciones Antílope and lives in Mexico City.
The lighthouse shown above is the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse, built in 1871 in Newport, Oregon