I liked the concept of Schematics more than I liked the execution of it. It sounds so promising: the back cover describes it as a “sparse, meditative, and enigmatic narrative embroidered with schematic diagrams,” and in an essay at the end of the book David LaRocca says that “Throughout Schematics Hibbard demonstrates the persuasive power of apposition: how evocative words, poetic phrasing, and primordial insight can transform an inherited, seemingly irrelevant, schema into something that feels necessary, essential, eternal.” Which sounds so good, right? The problem, for me, was that I didn’t find the words particularly evocative, the phrasing particularly poetic, or the insights particularly primordial or even insightful. The text did strike me as enigmatic, but in a way that hovered between intriguingly odd and just banal, but tipped too much toward the latter. And while the banality may have been intentional, may be part of a statement Hibbard is making about love and life and the universe, I just wasn’t that interested.
The book is divided into three “acts,” but the divisions between the acts seemed fairly arbitrary to me, though quite possibly I’m just missing something. The first act contains reflections on growing up and love and loss. The second act starts with a sense of the possibilities of a new romance but takes a turn toward the ominous, including lines like this:
The War has started.
It is green.
Abstract.
Unclear.
And then the third act seems more personal again, more about love again, and also about memory, and again about loss. At the end of the book, an appendix explains what each diagram depicts, and that was pleasing to read, and I also liked LaRocca’s essay. And there were individual pages/pairings that I liked, like a diagram of crazy loops and swirls that turns out to be the “trajectory and plot of a bird flying then gliding” paired with these lines:
I am in-between.
Never here, never there.
Endless travel.
But I just couldn’t get interested in things like:
I miss you.
I would reach out and touch you,
if I could.
You can see the first nine diagrams in the book (and read the accompanying text) in a mention of the book on the Huffington Post.
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