Psalms 91 begins:
1. Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
2. I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’
This messianic psalm is about positioning the spiritual life above the life of the flesh. It goes on: ‘If you say, “The Lord is my refuge”…no harm will overtake you.’ The psalms are liturgical prayers, meaning that they are for public worship. The origins of the synagogue occurred in exile, so say some scholars; synagogues, after the destruction of Jerusalem, could come into being with just ten men in a space they claimed for worship. It is impossible to ignore the connection of these two things: a people made a perpetual kind of refugee by racism, forced from home after home; and the trembling knowledge that this material world could never deliver a stable sense of real belonging. In the case of Jewish exile, this connection is true, it is material. But its truth says something to me too.
I have my doubts, though, about whether, with the inheritance I have, which is rational which is Western which is ‘sceptical’, I am allowed even imaginary access to this spirit world. Unlike exiles of the recent past, who, without a home had at least a tradition, faith, a stable spiritual home to dwell in, I am instead destined to find home only in mortar and rootlessness.
But then again, what is an interior life if not a chorus of invisible ghosts shouting at one another: parents and siblings and friends and lovers and teachers and enemies and masters and every novel newspaper celebrity and the dead, all of the dead. What is history if not a stunted, haunted conversation between the living and the dead? Inviting the dead into the world of the living is finding a way to be at home in the body, which is not only a body made of skin and bones. A body that exists only because it exists in relation to the deceased bodies that have created it.
I don’t have to romanticise an ontology I have no access to (say, early Jewish spiritualism) in order to witness the non-material world. Indeed, the ‘ancestors’ and the ‘communities’ we believe we have shucked off (where I come from, at least) are still present. They haunt us, not least because they make it possible for us to be alive. And maybe knowing this might make it imaginable for me, now, to find a kind of home that is rich and interior and not connected to buildings or wealth or authorised belonging. One that is perhaps, for the first time, respectful of the living and the dead.
Notes to Unlived Time
Unlived time, the part of time that can never belong to us…
—Bhanu Kapil
Four months into my stay in Germany I realise I have been wearing the same heavy coat every day for more than twelve months. A faded, used-to-be-black London Fog I bought at a thrift store for twenty-five dollars. Every day for more than a year, because I moved to a new hemisphere. How long can a person purely winter, I think; how many blue-black days can she endure without cracking it.
The chill stirs up my longing for warm bare-leggedness. Fake-tanned bare-leggedness. Hot itchy days, hot romance nights.
An involuntary memory comes as I walk across Winterfeldtplatz, carefully, avoiding iced puddles. A night I stayed in summer Sydney with J, who I was losing my mind over. I was twenty-three and he tall, slender, older enough for me to go soft for. I identified him by the character he liked to play: the Intellectual, which I liked playing at, too. Wanted to impress him so much, and the way to do that was by keeping my mouth shut. At the cinema we saw Melancholia by Lars von Trier and walked back to my place in the dark wet heat. Street lights illuminated the front-yard plants all glossy and thick-stemmed alien. Cockroaches crawled out from every crevice, scuttled across the pavement. A feeling, biblical. ‘Are you supposed to kill them?’ I asked him as I crushed one under my blue suede sandal. ‘So juicy,’ I said. ‘Seems wrong.’
We talked in a civilised tone about the film, me pretending I was an A-plus student by birth, lah lah lah, me pretending I was knowledgeable about the cinematic arts enough to be loved by him, when my only real observation was that I’d never seen depression rendered so true. We avoided the obvious, though, because I suppose he was tricking me into loving him too. This was during that period of mania for the other that sometimes happens and which disturbs sleep.
What would I be if I had stayed with that man.
Every time I looked at his neck I thought guillotine, it was that thin.
…
All elements align for work to ensue. Except for the main ingredient: will. Instead, I read emails from four-to-ten years ago. I keep my old emails, keep the passwords to old accounts. I tell myself this is for work, the work of writing memoir, which might be the same as sentimentality, or laziness. I revisit old emails more frequently than I am emotionally equipped for. I read one from the man whose neck I thought about slicing; over two years, he and I created a vast archive of correspondence; each email longing for the next. When I rifle through these old ruins, my heart starts jumping. Not because of the long-forgotten names, the lovers I can’t for the life remember loving, the former cohabitants who no longer circuit my existence. Although there is that. I shudder because of the plans I made—and documented—and then never fulfilled. The voice from the past that was so desperate for a future. Whose voice is that?
I read an email where I declare to the recipient that I am writing a novel (no idea what about). I am making an anthology of contemporary manifestoes. I am considering moving to Montreal. I am starting a radical university for writers and thinkers that has nothing to do with the University.
It’s touching, I suppose, to see myself like that, a girl of future action. But mostly there is chagrin circling the absence of my follow-through. Fantasy futures not lived, having never lived.
…
On Sunday Dom and I slugged around in bed all day. Early love days, cocooned in faith for the future. I made a salad we heated up the leftover lasagne we watched maybe three films in a row and fucked in the style of cinematic love making. Except I was bleeding so there were more paper towels.
The first time there had been blood, too. We’d spent the day glued together, not yet kissing, then walked at midnight touching hands. We sat on the steps in front of a church, the new brick kind that lets sun in through huge yellow windows, and talked about the books we loved and hated, inflecting our readings with more seriousness than you move me, and we talked about the kinds of relationships we’d been in before and how they hadn’t worked because of the highly specific ways we envisioned spending our days. Not the slug days, but the work days, and the warm sensation struck I could five-years-into-the-future the sensation of holding his hand and curling his hair his ear love.
A tousled ginger cat marched quickly before us across the street, little ginger paws motoring madly beneath its body. And a few beats later three foxes marched after it—two luxuriant fur tails, one missing a chunk—jogging with the same urgency as the cat but not breaking into a sprint, which led me to believe the fox crew was not there to murder the cat but to collude with him or her on a midnight mammal project.
This may well have been my first urban fox sighting, but I can never really differentiate between what I’ve seen with my body, in time and space, and what I’ve seen on TV and later revisited in a dream. It’s becoming a problem: have I ever really seen a killer whale?
The point is that this staunchly European sighting elated me so I turned and kissed this man I thought I would love for at least five years and it was rather uncoordinated but still we went back home and my blood was thickly hot and crimson and within minutes the scene was butchery yet overall primitively hot.
…
When I teach writing, I sometimes encounter a question I don’t always know how to answer. It goes like this: but why should we write? Why write, when there is so much horror going on in the world?
Privately, I think: what has horror got to do with writing or not writing? I think: there is sweetness in the world, too, and scatological humour. There is time in the day. Enough time, maybe, for ever
ything. I think, my inner curmudgeon revealing herself: if there is time for binge drinking and spin class and pets, there is time enough for writing.
I say, more often than not: let’s take this excellent question to the class, shall we?
This doubting student might only be spoiling for a fight, uninterested in books or writing and looking to justify her prejudices. But she might also be a doubting writer, an earnest one, seeking only a witness, an accomplice, a nod of the head at just the right time, someone to confirm: it’s allowed, you’re allowed to write and you’re allowed to read despite—or because of—the horror.
The first time I fielded this question I was unprepared. There was no evidence I could call on to prove the virtue or vice of reading or writing. Literature is not a ‘pure’ thing, not by any stretch; it does not arrive from a white monad. It’s conditioned by the materials of its production, the ideological constraints of time, place, power, personality. It is historically contingent, sometimes awfully so. Alan Liu writes that ‘the churning of literary capital has always characterized literature. Literature could not have been part of the life of culture otherwise.’ Is this what the (now hypothetical, purely rhetorical) student is speaking to when she questions the act of writing? The ‘churning of literary capital’? Does the doubter mean: why write, when literature has so often helped naturalise—rather than expose or challenge—harmful ideologies?
That is: the horror right now. A mass extinction event; ten million stateless people on earth; crop death; the resurgence and mainstreaming of fascism. Add to this road rage. Add to this weak teabags. Add to this cheating spouses; period pain; rude customers; missing library books; bank fees; the privatisation of health care; the existence of real-estate agents. I don’t want to be the one to stand at the head of a classroom and argue that what the world needs right now is another book-object, made with seriousness and care, printed on dead trees and transported with fossil fuels, circulated endlessly between naughty, horroravoidant humans like me. But every action contains an argument. My standing in the classroom is itself an argument, and I am responsible for the arguments I make.
Why write? Especially about something as trivial as the particularities of one’s own creature thoughts, habits or obsessions? My timeline fills with these endless ‘debates’ about what the hell a person is now, about how ‘self-representation’ fares in the internet age. Is the personal essay a corrupt form? (Possibly.) Does social media promote narcissistic behaviour? (I suppose.) Is ‘self-care’ a neoliberal scam promoting individualistic coping strategies in the absence of broader social obligations or the possibility of radical structural change? (Well, yes, I say to myself as I slip into my fourth late-night bath of the week, thinking about my next semester of unemployment.)
So I make notes in preparation for more questions. Now when the student raises her hand and asks, in a voice tinged with cruelty or boredom or curiosity or desire, ‘But why?’, I will say:
+ Because there is a human future; maybe not a forever-future, but one beyond now. Writing is an argument for hope: it believes in the future; it believes, even, in futures it ought to know better than to. It believes in the ongoingness, the wanton tenacity, of human beings.
+ Because the only world we know, we know through the inches of shadowed pink between our ears. Everything is mediated through our spongy, lumpy brains. Writing can’t help but demonstrate how dubiously, how erroneously and how enchantingly knowledge is produced, remembered, transmitted.
+ Because one’s own shadowy pink matter enfolded in bone is unlike anybody else’s. Because this singularity is repeated endlessly: this is the unfolding diversity of the world.
+ Because, as Édouard Glissant writes, ‘we change through our exchange with others’. Because writing makes detours from individual truths and desires and dreams. It anticipates and facilitates exchanges between people who were never supposed to meet.
+ Because when I pick up a second-hand book, I hope for a letter inside, or a tram ticket from 1985, or—god willing—a coffee-ringed photograph of a stranger’s child.
+ Because when I open a new book I flip straight to the acknowledgements—doesn’t everyone? What matters most to me is: what kind of person writes about made-up others? Or writes about ideas to which ‘real life’ is supposedly subordinate? Or writes the minutiae of their lives, their hearts, their tongues. To whom do they owe their freedom?
…
My freedom to write is owed to a messy, undisciplined mind. I can manage my physical life, mostly: I bathe, I cook, my house and clothes are clean. The files on my laptop, though, offer a more honest window into my unconscious. My laptop, where I spend my waking life, is not so much a ‘filing system’ as a temporary storage shed jam-packed with empty bleach containers, rolled-up mouldy carpets, an upside-down shopping trolley. All circled by twelve slow-moving blowflies. There are loose ‘drafts’ everywhere, some of just a line or two or a quote from something I read some time over the past seven years. They are notes, I suppose: trash note archives.
One draft I stumbled on recently: a list of a daily word count from a project I was working on, declaring that I will write four pages a day! Which I sort of did, which is why, when I try to read that project now, parts of it are incomprehensible. Like most writers I cobble together my living from teaching, editing, and a combination of professional and unprofessional writing gigs, other work. That I fail to create and maintain a naming system means to find what I’m looking for I must rifle through tens, hundreds, of files with names like ‘Reason (1)’ (a letter outlining my ploy to win an extension of my PhD scholarship); ‘about two weeks ago’ or ‘June 4’ (documents containing observations from or about the time of their title); ‘I like women who take no prisoners’ (a document that contains nothing other than the phrase ‘I like women who take no prisoners’, which I don’t know that I do). These are objective correlatives of a fragmented life—of deep, psychic disharmony. No wonder I feel scattered. Why can’t I get it together? Why don’t I label these correctly, or suggestively? Do I even care if they are ever read again? What is the future, if the present has me over a barrel?
Perhaps, I have thought, the notes are not strictly for revisiting. Perhaps they’re artefacts of good intentions. They are the insisted-upon valour of making the (always-broken) promise that they’ll be returned to, retrieved, revised. Notes; hope! Their real addressee is time—things being recorded as they pass by, for the future note-reader to recall. Gestures towards a future that will almost certainly not care.
…
I know of an author who is in the early stages of a successful career. The author posted on social media about being contacted by the National Library, who wanted to acquire her personal papers. Humble-brag aside, she was seeking advice: sell now? Or hold on to the documents for a higher bid, which would surely come at some point later in her career? (Banking on the knowledge (the hope) that her career would continue to flourish. Banking on the impossibility of knowing what will come.)
This thought, to me, was horrifying. Incredible, I thought, that there’s a kind of person in the world who is playing the long game, perhaps the longest game imaginable; who has been styling notebooks, early ones, from a time before they were of interest to any library, in such a way that a reader in the future could generate from them meaning, or worse: reproduce them in part, or in full. This degree of future planning, with the intention to control time that is yet unlived, seemed masterful and unreal. (Or sensible, if the future is to be taken for the unforgiving entity it is.) Notes as unfinished business, unattended potential, the writing that is closest to life. Which is terrible. Fragments of potential, they attend to the fantasy that effort is not wasted. Like sowing seeds, but without that loving deliberation. A blind, unconscious hope that a fragment of a thought caught in a note might germinate in a natural way, without tending; that it might wiggle down to find a sip of water, catch a slice of sun through the specks of soil and erupt into the light.
…
On weekends, I am trying to make a habit of going to the Schöneberg Flohmarkt. For the caramel pleasure. The erotics of the discarded. Each Saturday the stink of it, dim old furs and fatty wurst and mildew. Clouds of steam out your lungs through your nose. All the almost-not-chipped china. I went today to find materials for collaging. Trying to make a habit of that too, of making things for no good reason. My delight then at the two-euro book stand, aisles and aisles of open cardboard boxes stacked with books in several languages, many of them old art and cinema periodicals. Decided on a budget of maybe ten euros for whatever might look good cut up on my bedroom floor.
This became the most luxuriant joy. Buying armfuls of printed matter indiscriminately.
In the haul, I picked up an art book called The American Tradition, a 1959 copy of an art journal, a 1981 edition of the New Orleans Review, a catalogue for an exhibition called German Expressionist Film by the Goethe Institute New York, and a stack of cinema and theatre magazines, my favourite of which is simply an abridged version of King Lear illustrated in savage colours. The Goethe Institute catalogue contains maybe twenty risograph pages, each one describing a different German interwar expressionist film.
All useless, according to the common sense of utility, yet all of them inspiring in me curiosity and the simplest delight. Delight in the fact that beautiful things made by people forty years ago sit around, bringing pleasure to a stranger in the now. It reminds me of my duty, everyone’s duty, to the future. My friends’ kids will need in twenty years to find crap like this at the markets so that they can feel held by the hands of past people’s future dreams and not feel totally alone.
Blueberries Page 15
