Friday Bullets

1. I should really be writing a very serious review of Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, which was a stunning novel. But Friday is never a good day for that sort of thing, in either writing or reading. I want people to read the novel, so I decided to schedule a review for early next week and do something foolish and frivolous today.

2. I’ve taken most of this week off, as I realised I’d been cramming as much reading and writing as possible into the past six weeks and my brain was feeling fried. This was a ‘light’ reading week, and even so I’ve read two books and parts of two others. I’m hardly complaining – is there a better way to spend one’s time? – but a break was necessary.

3. Over these past six weeks I’ve been helping two friends with some editing. One has written a novel, the other is in the process of writing a series of linked short stories. I’ve been loving it. Of course, it helps that both are fantastic writers, but the whole experience has made me think that this is something I could actually do a lot more of, though I expect I’m too old now to move into publishing. I would like to run my own online literary journal, though, and can see quite clearly what I’d want it to be. Not this year, maybe not next, but I’ll do it one of these days.

4. I had completely forgotten about my creative non-fiction reading, and suddenly realised I was almost on top of my deadline for the next book. I’ve begun Geoff Dyer’s Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, and it’s an easy read, though Dyer takes inordinate pleasure in focusing on the disastrous side of exotic travel. I expect by the end to admire it, and to feel confirmed in my desire never to strike out for radically different cultures and climates.

5. A word about women’s writing week, too: Dark Puss and I felt we needed more reading time, so we have rescheduled our posts on our joint reads for the third week in June. I’m actually making the whole of June about women’s writing, simply because I have so much good stuff to read. It does happen to include Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and if possible the ongoing Karl Ove Knausgaard. So they’ll just have to be honorary girls for the month.

6. My poor son is deep in revision for his upcoming examinations. I wanted to give a shout out to all the poor souls stuck in what feels like the endless loop of exams. I can promise you that summers without them are every bit as great as you’d imagine, and that whilst exams dominate the moment, they are surprisingly unimportant compared to the other great events of life. Watch the news – it’ll put them in perspective.

Life; An Alternative

I once read a case study about a child who, when she learned that her parents were splitting up and they would have to move house, took one of the ornate candlesticks from the dining room table and buried it in the garden. This was perhaps not the most fortuitous choice as the parents thought they’d been burgled and called the police in, but the child sat tight-lipped, and never gave a sign of what had been done. Years later as an adult in therapy she recalled the incident, eventually returned to the house and, with more permission than she’d had the first time around, dug the candlestick up again. It had served its purpose as a horcrux. For all those years it had held a part of her that had been happy and secure, keeping faith with a version of herself she knew she would have to leave behind. Burying it had been an act of self-protection, and a promise to the future.

I remembered this case study while reading Neil Ansell’s latest book, Deer Island, which begins and ends with a similar act at an isolated cairn in the wild and mostly uninhabited Isle of Jura in the Hebrides. In Neil Ansell’s case it’s even more extraordinary that he should have anything at all to leave behind. I fell in love with his first book, Deep Country, which was about five years spent in a tumbledown cottage in the heart of the Welsh countryside practising a kind of extreme self-sufficiency. This new book, a hybrid of nature writing, travelogue and memoir, starts from an earlier time in his life when he worked in London for a charity, The Simon Community, dedicated to helping the homeless by finding them safe spaces where they could live on their own terms. Those who worked for the charity accepted voluntary poverty themselves – no wages, no possessions, no place of their own to live. They stayed with the homeless in their squats and derries and at the residential centres owned by the charity.

The boundary between the homeless and the volunteers was such a ‘porous’ one that ‘there was risk of traffic the other way, too.’ And this book treads an exquisitely fine tightrope between the healthiness of being free and empty-handed and its unhealthy flipside, spiritual destitution. At the heart of Neil’s writing there’s an extraordinary mindset in this age of acquisitiveness, one of absolute simplicity, in which the narrator has nothing but his inner resources and is, for this very reason, infinitely open to the world around him.

After three years with the charity, he was burnt out and exchanged his London life for peripatetic travel, striking out for mountains and deserts, places of emptiness and otherness. One journey takes him to the Isle of Jura, whose wild and windswept beauty enchants him. It’s a sanctuary of sorts, a place of soothing wilderness and welcoming locals. But another takes him to the Kalahari and the Makgadikgadi salt pans, the ‘most extreme landscape’ he had ever seen. The experience is a turning point of sorts, a moment of such fierce impression that it leaves a mental and emotional bruise: ‘The land stretched perfectly flat and unmarked to every horizon. Except there was no horizon, because the heat haze melded the earth to the sky in an unbroken wash of light. The pans were the bed of a shallow lake long since dried up, leaving just salt. The earth was a crystal plain, entirely featureless.’ Finally a flatbed truck with a dozen or so other travellers turns up and he hitches a lift, through two hours of desert storm with forked lightning and icy cold torrential rain.

I think part of me was washed away by that rainstorm in the desert. I felt that I no longer had any will, any power of self-determination, that I no longer had any control over my future, that any choices I could make were an irrelevance, that I was in the hands of the universe and I could only follow wherever it might lead me.’

Travelled out, he returns to London and, with no money and no job, realises he will have to pick up a lifestyle he once knew very well and find a squat in which to live. In the early days, the people he came to know shared a sort of integrity of the homeless. But during the intervening years, the culture has changed as hardcore drugs have swept through. The squat he finds which looks so promising at first – an empty children’s home – is subject to a hostile takeover by drug dealers and eventually wrecked. Sullied by the experience, Neil Ansell needs to take one more journey, one that will bring him back to himself.

I thought this book was amazing, and it’s extremely hard to write about in a way that does it justice. It is very short and written with such directness and lucidity in a style that manages to echo the unpretentious economy of Neil’s way of living. Yet it evokes such spiritual depth and explores such strange and unusual places. It is not at all a religious book, but I can’t quite shake the impression of the narrator as a modern day saint (not that he’d thank me for that description, I’m sure!); at the very least he is a man with a shining faith in the fundamental goodness of humanity, and the willingness of the world, even in its most inhospitable spots, to encourage and nurture life. Deer Island looks at the oddest of communities and the most extreme places with gentle tenderness and poetic sensibility, and it considers what really remains with us from sometimes vivid, sometimes violent, experience. It’s quite a book that, after forty years of pretty intensive reading, takes me somewhere I have never been before and am not likely to go again. I thought it was creative non-fiction at its finest.

To Overshare Or Not To Overshare?

Kathryn Harrison had a succès de scandale in the late 90s with her memoir The Kiss, in which she recounted the four years of incestuous relationship she had with her father. Thinking to save that book for the program of creative non-fiction works I’m reading this year, I decided to try her out with a different memoir, The Mother Knot. It was 82 pages of dynamite that held me gripped as soon as I’d begun, and yet when I finished, I began to wonder about the last thing that should seem problematic with such a candid and upfront narrator – the truthfulness of the story.

The narrator is weaning the youngest of her three children when the memoir begins. At 26 months, her daughter is relatively grown-up for breastfeeding, but it is a wrench for her mother, and one that darkens her underlying mood. Not long after this, her 10-year-old son develops severe asthma, and in her extreme anxiety over his condition, Kathryn Harrison finds herself drawing dark and superstitious conclusions. Although she nurses him with an assiduity and attention to detail that could not be bettered, her growing belief is that somehow she is the cause of his illness:

It had been four months before my son’s hospitalisation that I’d stopped nursing, relinquished that cherished perception of myself as my children’s primal source of sustenance and love. Now the onset of my son’s asthma attack struck me as an indication of my new impotence. Worse and more irrationally, it seemed to reveal me as dangerous. I saw – felt – a black, destructive spirit, dybbuk or dervish, twisting out of my chest, a force of corruption that sprang from me and infected my son, choked and smothered him.’

Harrison is an intelligent lady, and she’s had a reasonable amount of therapy. She knows that her mindset is related to the complicated and dissatisfactory relationship she had to her own mother, who gave birth to her at 17 and then abandoned her to grandparents six years later. The pregnancy was intended to place some distance between Kathryn’s mother and her grandmother, a relationship that was itself fraught with possessiveness. Kathryn, her mother told her, was intended to be ‘a hostage’, someone to take her place and allow her the freedom she had never had. Understandably, Kathryn as a child found this reasoning hard to follow, aware only that she was unable to please her mother, despite the ballet, the Sunday school and the diets. She emerged from the relationship with an unshakeable conviction that she was bad, polluted and wrong. It didn’t take much in the way of crisis in her adult life to return her to that place of universal guilt, in which she could be responsible even for the illness of her son.

As a strategy of appeasement, she starts to starve herself again. Anorexia turns out to be the ongoing problem: ‘I admitted that anorexia was a maladaption; and I admitted, with chagrin, to more than two decades of remissions mistaken for recoveries.’ Like most anorexics, the practice has much less to do with body shape than it has to do with mental control and darkly divine sacrifice. ‘Would that it were as simple as vanity,’ she tells her husband, when he says, in an attempt at coertion, her how much less attractive she looks too thin. ‘I’d characterized my eating disorder as a shatterproof glass box. I was inside, alone and safe. I could see out, and nothing could get in.’ But a life devoted to the harshest form of self-control is taking its toll. Her doctor threatens her with hospitalisation unless she gets her eating under control, her therapist is losing patience with her, and she fears how angry her husband will be if she can’t take care of herself well enough to be the wife and mother their family needs. In extremis, she knows she must confront the ghost of her mother, dead these past seventeen years, and finally break free.

I’ve quoted the text as much as possible because Kathryn Harrison is an amazing writer. The prose is powerful, vivid, economical, the mysteries of the mind described with exquisite insight and acuity. For a brief memoir, this certainly packs an emotional punch although the touch is light. The arc of the narrative flies like a skimming stone, glancing off the most salient points of her story – her relation to her mother, the vortex of uncontrollable emotions that threaten to pull her down, the epiphany she experiences and the solution she discovers. It is all brilliantly done, and so neat and tidy, not a single word wasted.

This was, I felt, an amazing piece of storytelling. And yet everything that was so well done about it, took it further and further away from life as we live it, and crises as we actually experience them. Where was the resistance, the procrastination, the backsliding that attends every inch of fresh terrain won from the forces of negativity that run their lucrative rackets in the mind? Where were the months spent stumped and hopeless in the therapist’s chair? Deep-rooted problems are beyond stubborn to dig out, and they react poorly to just about any form of treatment. Like computers, minds have default settings, bizarre agreements that were made in the era before reason, or awareness of the true value of things, and they are the very devil to uproot.

But of course, none of this makes for good storytelling, necessarily. One of the best novels I’ve ever read about the therapeutic process is the highly autobiographical The Words To Say It by Marie Cardinal. When that book was translated into English, the translator felt justified in leaving a whole chunk of it out, on the grounds that it was repetitive. This was the point. The myths on which we base our sense of self have to be gone over again and again. And probably again. You may well ask, does it matter if we leave some of this out in the stories we end up telling about ourselves? And I think it does, because storytelling is not innocent, when it comes to the connection between identity and narrative. The tighter the story, the more beautiful it is, the less we want to unravel it. This is the way that those original stories of love and terror bind us in the first place. And then I worry that people in trouble might read this and view it as inspirational, wondering miserably why they are not capable of identifying and solving their problems as slickly. When the truth is that healing is a messy, graceless process, not an edited montage.

But… I would not be honest, either, if I denied what a well-written book this is, or how compellingly it reads, or how piercing its understanding of psychic pain. Read it for its insight and its honesty, but do not believe it is the full truth.

Bluets

 

1. ‘Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a colour,’ Maggie Nelson writes in the first of 240 numbered paragraphs. ‘Suppose I were to speak this as if it were a confession’. Already there is a nugget here, a knot, a twist of thought containing strands that are both related and dissimilar. We confess to love, but rarely to loving a colour as if it were a romantic passion. But this is the springboard for her poetic exploration into a strange but profound attachment to the colour blue, a colour that evokes divine beauty, depression and ribald explicitness in equal measure.

 

2. Blue now appears in all sorts of ways, as a magical element of the natural world, as the infinite variation in a huge and disparate assortment of objets trouvés that Maggie Nelson’s magpie eye has found and coveted, and as a word full of rich associations in songs, poems, works of philosophy. Nelson probes the deep emotional bond that ties her to the colour, and spreads her out into the world as a curious but sometimes mystified spectator. ‘When I talk about colour and hope, or colour and despair,’ she writes, ‘I am not talking about the red of a spotlight, a periwinkle line on the white felt oval of a pregnancy test, or a black sail strung from a ship’s mast. I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.’

 

3. What it means apart from meaning seems to be blue’s capacity as foil for, diversion from, and mask over a failed love affair that Nelson is grieving. We never learn much about this lost love, except for the lostness, and the harshly evoked misery that she feels. She quotes Thoreau, in the wake of his falling out from Emerson: ‘When our companion fails us we transfer our love instantaneously to a worthy object.’ Whether this is exactly what she has done or not is, like everything else in this text, offered as a suggestion that flowers momentarily with possibility and meaning before drifting off into the white space of uncertainty.

 

4. This is what the numbered paragraphs contain: blossoms of thought, startlingly bright and vivid as the cornflowers (bluets) whose name they evoke. Each little paragraph a kind of standalone prose poem in a field thick with them. Although the proper origin of the numbered paragraph is the philosophical proposition as offered by thinkers like Wittgenstein. In this case, each proposition builds towards a profound truth by way of these individual building blocks. The white space in philosophy is like a pause in music, a moment for the mind to digest what has preceded and to ready itself for further ingestion. But the white space in prose poetry is the place for the mind to give itself over to speculation, dreaming, the lazy mingling of ideas and emotions. Is this the effect of Maggie Nelson’s white spaces? Or do they work to undermine the coherence of any message she might be offering the reader?

 

5. Nelson is not the only person speaking in this text by a long shot. Her voice is plaited through a rich and diverse network of cultural geniuses (nothing but pure art gets cited here). I started a list, but gave up because the non-Greek chorus of commentators became just too unwieldy. Mallarmé, Goethe, Wittgenstein, Newton, Gertrude Stein, William Gass, Emerson, Schopenhauer, Marguerite Duras (who I am always pleasantly surprised to see mentioned), Billie Holiday, Derek Jarman, Novais, Van Gogh, even William Carlos William’s grandmother gets a name check (ah, so of course, not all geniuses then, not even this can become a stable rule or certainty). They all have something to say about the colour blue, for the most part, or suffering, sorrow and the mysteries of vision.

 

6. What are we to make of this web of creativity, spun around Maggie Nelson and her pain and passion? Perhaps she is akin to the male satin bowerbird she describes, who spends weeks hunting down blue objects with which to weave an enticing nest for his female. ‘He builds competitively, stealing treasures from other birds, sometimes trashing their bowers entirely.’ Goethe, Mallarmé et al are surely robust enough to withstand the nicking of little bits of blue from their collected works, in the good cause of creating a blue nest woven around the seductive Nelson, who lures her reader in.

 

7. I should mention also the paraplegic friend Maggie Nelson talks about often, whose life was ruined by an accident and whose courage is immense but not always equal to her pain. Nelson cares for her tenderly, seeing in her suffering perhaps an echo of her own, or maybe seeing in her situation the chilling affirmation that some accidents of life have everlasting consequences.

 

8. But by this point in the book we may well be asking ourselves where we are actually going with all this. In the absence of a full narrative arc, standing like a rainbow over the text and pointing towards a pot of gold, will this meandering river of blueness ever deliver us to a destination? Or are we to question what ‘getting somewhere’ in a narrative means? Whether we can ever find a solution to the questions of Bluets, if indeed any questions have ever been properly posed?

 

9. Bluets spirals around its concerns, touching upon them in turn and moving restlessly on. It has no interest in closure, nor in explanation. Although it takes a form that was once linked with the original understanding of philosophy, which strove to identify what exactly we could know with complete certainty, its heart beats with the more modern understanding, in which philosophy seeks to track down a truthful experience of life as it is lived. It is a shift from cognitive mastery of the world, to close observation in service of a life whose mysteries will to some extent remain intact.

 

10. And so, in this rich, frustrating, beautiful, poignant union of philosophy and poetry, the objective proposition yields to the subjective insight. Life cannot be cured, love cannot be explained, pain cannot be deconstructed. Together they form the skein of an emotional life that is as tightly tangled as it is powerfully binding. Maggie Nelson and her friends evoke the potency of both passion and suffering, and the glorious distractions of art, thought and beauty that act as insufficient but dazzling palliatives.