Blueberries

by Ellena Savage

  People you went to university with have their own little magazines now. You give them your writing and agree to read at their launches. You invite them to contribute to your magazine. They read at your launches. You give money to their crowdfunded edition and they give money to yours. You have six dollars left in the bank. You are tired from the deadlines for the jobs done overnight to fit it all in. Your right shoulder is sore. Your median nerve is fried. Your boyfriend doesn’t give you massages. You break up with your boyfriend. The man who is now your ex-boyfriend starts giving you massages.

  You are a writer and you know what that means. You’re not doing it for the money. You are not doing it for the money, which is a great reason people have to not pay you.

  You wear shiny shorts and a Margiela top to a fundraiser for an activist collective. Your bra is visible. Everyone’s bra is visible. It’s that kind of an activist collective. All of the activists are DJs. Some of them, they say, are also writers. You introduce yourself and invite the activist-DJs to submit to your magazine. On the way home, you listen to a lecture series about early Christianity. You go home to finish reading Andrea Dworkin’s first book, which is different from what you expected. You are diversifying your practice.

  You apply for international residencies. In your applications you recycle the garbled grantspeak phrases you are starting to know better than you know your own work. You attach a folio of your work, which has no real aesthetic unity because you have been diversifying your portfolio for years now. Your portfolio is read by RZA, who is on the board of an international residency you applied for. You do not get into the international residency that RZA is on the board of.

  You are late for the launch party of the magazine you edit. You are exhausted and slightly ill and it is midwinter, yet it is crucial that you are there. You spend thirty-five dollars on a cab fare and you get one free drink at the bar. You introduce yourself to someone who says you’ve been introduced before and so quickly you introduce them to someone else. You are a writer and you know what that means: you are a maître d’. You work hard, but do you work smart? No one is paying you for this. Your colleague is DJing the party. Someone you haven’t been introduced to is taking photos at the party. You introduce yourself. You and she are in this together. Perhaps you are even collaborators.

  …

  You collaborate with an artist on a performance work. You perform it together at a prestigious art space. A dancer approaches you, says we should collaborate. You never hear from the dancer again. An artist uses your work to accompany her video work. She does not attribute the text or audio recording to you. She does, however, take your author portrait for you and never invoices for it. There’s an artist you long to collaborate with but you can’t imagine dragging her into this. She is another kind of investor. You go to the launch of a young poet’s chapbook. You don’t recognise any of the faces, the faces all covered with a fine layer of subcutaneous fat and optimism. One of the poets starts DJing.

  You work hard but do you work smart? You resign from publications. Nobody notices. You are a researcher now. Maybe you are a poet too. You are an editor, paid to proofread masters theses in all areas of the humanities. You are a collaborator. You are not a DJ. You are presenting your work within a research context. You go to an academic conference and swap emails with early-career researchers.

  Your parents no longer know what you do for a living. Do you have a job? they ask. They know you are busy. You are on Twitter. Too busy to come over for lunch on Sunday. People you met at uni now have real jobs. They are no longer writer-investors. They tell you how expensive life gets after you get a real job, how the price of a nice mattress is really quite steep. You wouldn’t know. You quit Twitter. Some of your peers now work in comms or advertising or arts administration. Maybe they are working on some unified future writing. Not you. You are a writer, and you know what that means: you don’t do it for the money. You don’t do it for the money, which is a great reason people have to not pay you for your writing.

  Antimemoir, as in, Fuck You (as in, Fuck Me)

  Often I think that writing is a futile effort; so is reading; so is living.

  —Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

  What was the chief part of an orator? He answered, action: what next? action: what next again? action.

  —Francis Bacon, ‘Of Boldness’

  Stones underfoot: they’re slope-faced, many thousands of them, ancient as the moon. They crunch as she hobbles over them from the water’s edge towards the castle. She should have worn her runners. Up ahead, Kronborg Castle—Elsinore, for today—is as vast and regal as any castle. The scene is so familiar, though how could it be? It’s her first time in Denmark.

  —You didn’t go to Kronborg that day.

  —Let me do this. My way.

  —This is fiction!

  —A frame.

  The performance of Hamlet begins under the great white banner of the sky; scene by scene, the actors work their way through the halls and chambers and grounds of the castle. At each scene change, she follows the audience-herd around to the next set—which is just the castle, the castle is the set is the castle.

  Every year, a new season of Hamlet is staged at Kronborg.

  Must be a great gig for the actors, she thinks.

  —Rather, she imagines she’d have thought, had she been there…

  ‘One season,’ a Dane told her, ‘Jude Law played the role of Hamlet. It was like the biggest thing to happen in Denmark.’

  No Jude Law this time. Just actors with dark eye make-up smeared, whose faces seem, as all the Danes do, vaguely familiar to her. White people of a certain variety, the planes of their faces suggestive of her own and her brothers’: broad foreheads, small, round noses. Invasions a millennia old alive in the angles of their jaws, the licks of pale hair at their temples. ‘Viking’, she later learns on Wikipedia, doesn’t describe an ethnic group. Not the red-headed. Not the burly fleshed. Viking is just another word for marauder. Genetic memories, arbitrarily, violently implanted.

  Though ‘Viking Queen’ does have a ring more charming than ‘Pillaging Monarch’.

  What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! (Hamlet, act 2, scene 2)

  —And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

  —Oh, Hamlet. Hamlet and the pillaging monarchs. The forms upon which ‘the human’, humanity, that concept, that ideology, is based. Just a pile of worthless dust.

  She exits the castle early. Gets on a train back to the flat grey city. Enough Shakespeare for one day. Though she is in Copenhagen for a summer school on world literature—and Hamlet is the work of world literature, the work with multiple sources and endless articulations, adaptations—she hates the play: the wronged prince, the dead crazy girl, and in this instance—

  —This imaginary instance—

  the pompous black-cloaked production values.

  And these days, all castles look like Trump Tower to her.

  —Truth time.

  —Okay.

  —You didn’t go.

  —I didn’t. But, let me—

  —She didn’t really go to Kronborg Castle that day.

  She was supposed to go on the Hamlet excursion, a voluntary activity organised by the summer school she was attending. She should have (could have) been a good sport and gone along. But castles aren’t all that, and neither is Hamlet. And besides, the summer school had caused her to reel in mild horror—for days at a time—at the institution, the roles and rules, of academia. So instead of attending the play, she, and he, took the train across the bridge to Malmö, sweet little Swedish city, to visit a friend.

  —A true story.

  —Why not?

  In Malmö that day, while the poor summer-school students went out to see a sad play, the friends
went to a green park and watched a band perform. The singer, a new Swede from old Iraq, told a true love story from the shores of Greece, where she had first arrived in Europe.

  —How true?

  —Stories of love are always true stories.

  The tale was simple. Two strangers met at the littoral, on a ribbon of sand between two lives they hadn’t yet chosen. Something sparkled right away, something like love, but the two were splintered apart before love could fuse them together. A year later, their bodies met again and completed the act of it, the falling in love of it.

  After the concert, they ate smoked eggplant with pomegranate seeds on top, scooped it up with hot round circles of bread. Drank a beer in a garden pub full of revellers who all knew their friend’s name and stopped to say hello. Went to sleep at their friend’s place, on his bed, with him on a mattress laid out beside them.

  —Better than Hamlet.

  —The best.

  …

  ‘Memories, images,’ Italo Calvino once said, ‘once fixed in words, are erased.’

  …

  I met this Malmö friend in Lisbon, where I was writing a rupture from years before. He was there to see a friend of mine, A, his best friend from back home—a great dusty city, which had exiled them both several years before. A holiday. Both friends had been pushed from their homes, torn apart by catastrophe, split apart by lives they had not yet chosen. He to Sweden, A to Germany. They had arranged a room in the Lisbon hills, to fuse together again.

  While I was there, at the residency, I met an American artist, B, who was tracing her own ruptured lines, too. In beautiful, yellow Lisbon, city of faded opulence, whose grandeur is due, in part, in large part, to the bones that rest at the bottom of the Atlantic. Where it is impossible to look at the shimmering water without seeing the Middle Passage. (The Middle Passage, the first and greatest trauma on which the era of humanism, of Hamlet’s angst, of the ascendance of white skin to the top of the labour chain, is built.) The American artist’s lines were drawn from Goa, which had been taken, raided and used by the Portuguese empire for three centuries. When she looked at the glittering ocean, she, too, saw the ships. The American artist listened to me talk about my project, and offered me her copy of the poet Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. This book is Kapil’s first, and is as far as I know out of print. She gave it to me anyway. In it, I found answers to my questions—and the answer wasn’t me. The answer wasn’t single, nor was it what I longed for. In Vertical Interrogation, Kapil asks twelve questions. The worst of them: ‘Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?’ (A trick question: she’s only my mother to me. But the responsible I is too much to answer to.)

  —Right book at the right time.

  —Is like the right friend inviting you to stay with them a night.

  —Is like the true story of letting love in, despite the distance.

  I became obsessed with Kapil. Bought and read her books, read her blog and the anthologies she had contributed to, among them an edition of Chain from 2000 titled Memoir/Antimemoir. Saw that she had scheduled a free ‘Antimemoir and Charcoal’ workshop at a gallery in London. Looked up flights—forty-euro tickets there, twenty-seven back. So. A couple of months later in Spitalfields, I met Kapil in her flesh. She wore a cotton dress with a full skirt. Cuban-heeled boots. Leather jacket. Big hair and laughter, too.

  For the next three hours, she said once we’d sat down, I am yours. I am devoted. To you.

  This woman, I thought. And then she led a guided meditation.

  She sent us off with reams of white paper and sticks of charcoal to ‘free draw’ sprawled out on the floor of the gallery. This process, she said, might help us unblock a pattern, a repressed emotion, a shape, for a project that might otherwise be going nowhere.

  On the floor of the sunlit gallery, I rocked the base of the charcoal cylinder along the paper’s surface, rolled its edge to make a long coil of crescent moons. Formed a couple of mounds to one side. And dots surrounding the structure, like pollen in still air, gently spilling outwards, upwards.

  —Like spring snow.

  As each student taped their creation to the gallery’s walls for crits, I realised I had drawn a great throbbing cock. When it was my turn to have the drawing analysed, the other students said words like:

  —fertile

  —fecund

  —pollinate.

  Some bodies don’t somatise, Kapil said.

  And others are purely somatic, I thought, looking at my cock.

  …

  When I returned to the apartment where I lived, I realised I had a few weeks of spare afternoons coming up, so I decided to use them to organise some of my work, small essayistic things, into a hypothetical book proposal.

  —But. Why?

  —To somatise?

  —To let the pollen fertilise. To insist on the structure of my world.

  Hey, said the swinging, smiling, author me of the book proposal. You can bet on me to write a thought-provoking commercially successful essay collection!

  —Inwardly, of course, my shame.

  —Dickhead.

  I tried to think intentionally about the whole of them, these essays, collected, and the why. Were they essays? Were they memoirs? Was there a difference between the two?

  The things were referential, pointed to my real, fleshy time on earth, from the arc of the existence bestowed on me by my ancestors, filtered through the imperfect cadence of language. But was my life a complete one, with a story to tell? Was I a serious enough person to call my work autotheory? (No.) Should anyone care about the small line of vision that I am entitled to narrate?

  …

  ‘All the images will disappear,’ writes Annie Ernaux.

  …

  In selecting what to write down, what to include, one makes silence of all else. A shadow, or an outline.

  —You consecrate silence.

  Of all the lies told by and about writers, the biggest of them is that the truth is articulable; that it is the writer’s hallowed vocation to ‘name the world’ and in naming it, to remake it.

  —Instead, the writer makes the world silent.

  I only know spots and silence about my ancestors. Except for the gossip, which is the same as myth. When the last of my grandparents died, not so long ago, I felt history foreclose on me. My link to the living past was gone, and I had done nothing to salvage it while it was still possible.

  The grandfathers were not there to begin with—one dead for many years, the other, living, but not for long, on the other side of the world. It was the grandmothers I lost. They had been there; had been somewhat there. But I didn’t know them. Not at all. What were these old women like? Who had they been? Who were the girls and young women and middle-aged women that lived inside them? These carriers of all my potential and all my foibles, too.

  —Damaged people, traumatised, if you believe their children.

  —I do.

  What was their world?

  —Bad things. Terrible things. Things worse than Trump.

  —Every unhappy history is unhappy in its own way.

  Some of the things that are remembered, mythologised. These women I didn’t know.

  She remembers feeling jealous of the Italian women in the maternity ward who, unlike her, were permitted to make noise while they gave birth. They raged. They screamed. She kept it to herself.

  She could have been a pianist, she had said, she had said. But the piano, her lifeline, was gambled away by her father when she was still a girl.

  A baby at twenty, twenty-one. An unhappy marriage. Too young. Too much life yet to live.

  Her beloved cousin’s suicide, which no one told her about until after the funeral. So that she wouldn’t, couldn’t, make a scene.

  The six—or was it seven—miscarriages.

  Her great rebellion, going to art school, away from home, five years of drawing life, and breasts and cocks and legs and eyes, of falling in love with the youn
g art teacher. Their long walks around the harbour. When she graduated, her mother burnt all her artwork.

  Their cotton dresses. Homemade. Before factory clothing.

  The era of pants for women to wear to work.

  A migration. A cut-off everything from before. For the sun. For Australia.

  Her sun-damaged skin. Caramel wrapping.

  Three marriages.

  A single marriage. Smashed-vases obstinacy.

  Anorexia nervosa. Amid severe rations. Bombs.

  A legacy awoken two generations later.

  School friends who went to France to their slaughter. A fiancé who never came back.

  The Great Fog poisoning her baby’s lungs.

  Work. Telephone work. Office work. Factory work.

  Her triple bypass. Her son’s quadruple bypass. Her granddaughter, clutching her heart, eating tomatoes for their lycopene.

  Religious conversions. More than one. Less than three.

  Fatty mincemeat shepherd’s pie. Peck’s paste. Tuna boats. Corn relish on ham sandwiches. Rice salad. Canned asparagus. Bags of mixed nuts.

  And grandfather. All I know of him was that he was poor, but not the poorest. The poorest didn’t wear shoes to school. Before he died, Grandpa painted a self-portrait of his life, three metres long. A grand oil painting. Mum said that the image of his face as a dead man, at the bottom right corner, looked exactly as it did in the flesh, in his coffin. Waxy.

  The other grandfather I know even less about.

  She was gone, he said. She took him. And we were so young.

  —Surely there were funny things too. Surely their lives were not pure sorrow.