Month: June 2019

abnegation as statement

Posted on by metaphlame

venus

Ah. Ahhhhh.

This book was like someone you want to get close to who doesn’t pull away. After decades.

It stretches the whole length you want it to. And trusts you — believes in you, allows you — to take a completely different ending from the book if you recall one line uttered over 100 pages prior. Which I did.

Which changes everything.

God damn. I love that I am now a person who will swear out loud, into an empty room, when reading a book that does that to me. I love that I haven’t become someone who tamps that down. Because this book. You have to feel it fully. Or rather — you don’t have to. She gives you that way out. You could forget. You could not have been paying attention. You are completely allowed to do that, and walk off thinking one thing happened. But it didn’t. If you remember what you were told pages and pages and pages ago, it didn’t. Oh god, this book.

You should probably read it.

Of course I’m being deliberately vague. Because there is so much value in not knowing. And the final page of the book, the blank one at the end, is tattooed with so many page numbers. But one of them speaks directly to my favorite and memorized passage from Malafrena, so starkly I set my coffee down, left a busy room for somewhere quiet, to read it.

They sat, inclined towards each other, and exchanged some pain for a tragedy not exclusively theirs. Grace got up and went to the piano, as to a haven. Then turned and looked at Caro. “At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations.” What we are being, not what we are to be. They are the same thing.

This is definitely one of the books that will stick. I had thought it would just be well-phrased. Then as it went on I appreciated that it didn’t turn away over time, forget to call; leave letters unanswered. But shit.

“They would manage without me,” he said, “if I died.” He did not mean the conference, but the world. “Why not if I live?”

Seriously. Read this book.

pages

foreseeing everything but you

Posted on by metaphlame

venus

It is difficult to articulate how startlingly refreshing it is to read how Shirley Hazzard describes the internal lives of women. As I’m sure I’ve nattered on about far too much here, I am generally displeased with how women write about women. They strive too hard to be characters. This isn’t easily avoided, sure — we do it, I do it, in real life every day; extracting ourselves from the effort in prose isn’t easy — but the honest effort should be made. And too often it isn’t. Too often descriptive details are given as, themselves, triumphs. A sad thing happens and a woman sets her jaw. Strong in the face of adversity. Or she collapses in a state of despair. Giving in to the inevitable, a touching example of  humanity. Too much effort is made turning women into subjects, into the centerpieces of paintings bruised with light. We aren’t that. We, like anyone, are rarely so tidy as that.

Shirley Hazzard doesn’t do that with Caroline Bell. [An aside: I know nothing about Shirley Hazzard and I don’t want to: I haven’t googled her childhood, her love life, her history. I don’t want there to be a known set of circumstances that produce such honesty in a writer. I don’t want there to be a formula I missed out on. I don’t want to know.] She summarizes nothing, wraps nothing up in neat little epilogue packages. Things go well and Bell persistently acts as though they will stay that way, when she and we know they won’t. Things go poorly and we await the rest of the painting to arrange itself around her: the pathos, the incontrovertible realities of cruel fate, the resignation. But that doesn’t happen. The possibility rises, but never coalesces into the stagnancy of a woman in a painting, a woman on a page. Caro persists.

The only knowledge I allowed myself about this book, beyond its point-blank recommendation by Guy Gavriel Kay, was its publication date. 1980. So in 1980 we are allowed to see — someone is allowing herself to write — the immense frustration of being called upon to care for another with a mental illness that causes them to lash out, brutally, at everyone around, everyone who tries to help, with absolutely no awareness or grace regarding their tenderness. We aren’t asked to pretend perseverance in the face of that callousness is noble. We aren’t asked to pretend it is naturally the lot of unattached women to have to care like that; to become caretakers. We are allowed in on the secret that it fucking sucks. In 1980 we are allowed to look; in the book’s fictive 1960s — so far predating efforts at honesty — we are allowed to see. It sucks. This isn’t knowledge I’ve obtained firsthand but I’ve watched it cut the legs out from under so many people close to me, and I cannot stand the vanity in the lies people untouched by it tell themselves about it. She does so much. She’s an angel. A saint. She is not. She is in hell. She is aware of this.

That is in no way all there is to Caro Bell, but it’s the easiest of her truths to articulate. That honesty — honesty that is not brutal, as the phrasing unrolls itself to suggest, just waiting to be uttered. Brutality would require a deviation from the norm; for this not to be something assumed by and put upon so many people, thoughtlessly, by their unthinking peers who have dodged the bullet. Caro does not lie even to herself about Dora’s lunacy and the harm it does to everyone around her. Resigning herself to a life with Dora is a kind of collapse, a giving up, that it is in her to pursue but that she desperately does not want. In an age where culture obsesses over the decline in its women (as though there was an age that didn’t?), that frets over every tiny independence as a sign of wanton debauchery and Victorian values abandoned, Caro is intimately aware that she is not a poster child for any kind of liberation. She is trapped. By men who want her to brew tea instead of employ the language skills she passed multiple government tests to prove; by men who will blame her for the flippant disregard of their peers, as though her existence as a woman in the room, her distraction, her thingness, got in the way of their promotions or power lunches or petty personal victories. She does the honest thing and does not build herself a story promoting this, or attempting to flip it around or make herself a star in a tragic novel. This is not a tragic novel. Nor does it glorify a gut-deep grim refusal to submit. Caro persists, and that is all. It is everything.

“Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they’re made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self.”

In other books by women, it would be the heroine who delivers this line. But it is an American man who utters it here, a foreigner in grim drab London just like Caro. The point, though, is that she knows it. She knows already the truth of what he says here. That she wasn’t the one to voice it and put it on the table is immaterial. She is able to take real pleasure, in a life lately devoid of it, from someone uttering a truth of which she’s been abundantly, silently aware for years.

There is a real pleasure in that! And we know that as writers, as women, as people! But we lay that aside in favor of concocting these heroines who must always be the source of all knowledge, of every good line. That does such a disservice to the way people actually life their lives. To the startling joy that such moments really do give us. Ah, so this one gets it. That is a genuine and shocking and delicious realization. By insisting on characters who must always themselves be the ones to pronounce such truths — every single one, out loud to another character or internally in a monologue — we rob ourselves not just of the joy of the experience but of the hope for it. So many women writing women want their characters to be the savviest, the coolest, the calmest and most in control. Rarely do people feel like that. Rarely to people reduce down to a series of -ests. Shirley Hazzard does not do this with Caro, and it is fantastic.

“Caro stopped writing, and read the passage over. How sincere, judicious. How much easier it is to sound genuine when being derogatory.”

and

“She had no unoccupied zone of objective feeling. He supposed men might find irritating or formidable her air of awaiting some solemn event that could not possibly be their own approach. … He thought most men would hardly dare to touch her, or only with anger, because she would not pretend anything was casual. It was unflattering, what she was apparently willing to dispense with in consequence of this belief.”

and

“Incrimination and disgrace were growing on her, in that place, like old-maidishness; it was like sexual frustration to be always yearning for some spasm of decency that in this context could never occur. … There were rules of combat in which the victory went to those who could emerge with no pang of realization.”

crude beliefs

Posted on by metaphlame

venus

There was a challenge, I suppose, going around Twitter to name a book you most wish you could read again for the first time, and that seemed so much better a way to recommend a book to me than to simply say “this is the best.” Ranking things like that, even just in a handful of tied-for-favorites, inevitably requires explanation as to why they rank where they do, which inevitably invites clarification, winnowing, and dismissal, for rarely is the recipient of such a list measuring greatness on the same factors as oneself.

But Guy Gavriel Kay, among many others, responded with The Transit of Venus, which I think I recall being mentioned in a CBC interview of his. I tried to find it at the time in Kindle form, because I’d just bought one, but it wasn’t available then and it isn’t available now. So I ordered it physically and it…just…

I am definitely pleased to be reading it for the first time.

I am such a sap for its phrasing. For when the text decides to let you know it knows more than its characters, as do you.

“What she had read had evidently made her impatient of the prime discrepancy — between man as he might be, and as he was. She would impose her crude belief — that there could be heroism, excellence — on herself and others, until they, or she, gave in. Exceptions could arise, rare and implausible, to suggest she might be right. To those exceptions she would give her whole devotion. It was apparently for them she was reserving her humility.”

and

“[He] still spoke of Turkey as ‘the sick man of Europe,’ though the entire Continent was a casualty ward long since. His sympathies were with the manageable distances of the past rather than the extravagant reach of the future. The future had been something to talk about, one foot safely on the fender.

It was easy for youth to scent this out and condemn. Less easy to feel for what was human in it, let alone pitiful.”

and

“The inward tone in which men speak, casually, of what moves them.”

She, Shirley Hazzard, also uses colons in that incorrect way I so much like:

“‘Great Expectations,’ said Caro, who could real the billboard of a far-off picture house. The bus halted, and retrundled. The regularity of suburban streets had been shorn back for a highway: the new road fanned out across a rise, houses splayed back like buttons released over a paunch. In a blighted field a capsized merry-go-round was turning to rust; a strung-up sign had lost its introductory F, and read, in consequence, UNFAIR. A barn squatted by the roadside like an abandoned van. The bus plunged forward. At its roaring, a small car withdrew into a hedge: an animal bayed.”

That use of a colon is such a lure to me. It feels like the movie Cloud Atlas did when you realized who, in a great deal of very well-done makeup, was who, in the same story, different timeframe, tugging you along. Everything slotted into place, yes, but with the idea that you don’t have to be entirely blind as to its organization. The arrangement of the thing. Like the previous passages, where we are made privy with the text, via the description, of details, forces that are at present beyond the recognition of the characters we observe interacting in the world, it invites a sense of intimacy. Of…security? Many times when authors attempt this it comes off as haughty or judgmental, but not here. There is a sense (like in GGK’s own books, I suppose) that though the order of the world can never be grasped in full by those treading upon it, it can at least be glimpsed in patches here and there, and we are reassured, humbled, by those glimpses. Styles of writing that make you feel like that are treats to be stockpiled and savored.

Admittedly, too, I am a sap for reflections like this:

“Charmian Thrale pointed out a photograph above the sideboard. Three young men with hands raised and spread. The standing figure, in open shirt and white trousers, declaimed to the others, who were conventionally dressed in their clothes of 1913. Heads of pale hair were helmets, were crowns or halos. A larger nimbus arched the garden, where trees were massed above larkspur and a long lawn was methodically streaked with rolling. It seemed to be near dusk. And the magical youths on the grass were doomed by coming war, even the survivors.”

I suppose my attraction to such statements (and that time period in particular) is much the same as the others: it gives you a sense that you know something the characters don’t. Namely, how wretched mankind can make itself, after decades of convincing each other that this, this was the pathway to peace, success, a new dawn. I suppose that sounds bitter but I don’t mean it to be: there is a relief in knowing not to believe anyone’s promise of perfection. Of scientifically or socially-engineered reinvention. To have believed in that…to have lived through the 1890s, the 1900s, thinking this was it, the shimmering paragon of human achievement, these galloping advances in all we could do and believed ourselves capable of doing, and then to see what happened afterward…that would have been gutting. As it did gut so many writers writing then. It is a relief to know not to trust in that. To know that, if asked to believe in it, at least in this one sphere we know better.

I am, finally, a sap even for the epigraph:

J’ai rêvé tellement fort de toi,
J’ai tellement marché, tellement parlé,
Tellement aimé ton ombre,
Qu’il ne me reste plus rien de toi.

Which is from “The Last Poem,” a literal last poem written by Robert Desnos before he was killed in 1945 in the Terezin concentration camp. It translates, as Ruth Cassel Hoffman of SpkFrnch tells us, to:

I have dreamed so hard about you,
I’ve walked so much, talked so much,
Loved your shadow so much
That I have nothing left of you

dumpling

Posted on by metaphlame

Woke up reeling from a dream where I was in cooking school, supposed to receive a guest lecture from Anthony Bourdain. But that was the day he killed himself. So we went all the way up to our terrifying open-air 100+ story classroom, took a hard written test where we had to describe the preparation of a hearty side dish (I had chosen dumplings, because of something Bourdain had recently written about them), and then we had to get out for the next class, down rickety scaffolding steps (the elevators only went up, not down) with many horrible views of the drop, spliced between books, because this insane tower was what the school used for its library.

As I climbed, last of class because I was so afraid of heights, reeking of fear sweat, I tried to compose a letter to Bourdain, who in the dream had only tried to kill himself before, not succeeded. Now he had done it successfully, together with a fellow student of mine whom he might have been sleeping with, and in the letter I was trying simultaneously to tell him how much he meant to so many people — to me — and to interrogate him as to why. Why he’d gone and killed himself. It began, “Dear Sir.”

I apologized for being jealous of all the students I knew were better than me, as well as those who were just more charming or personable or funny, who just got more of his attention that way. I knew my cooking would never be inspired like that; it took me hard work and study and memorization and still I wasn’t always good. I wasn’t a magician in the kitchen and would always be outshined by those who were, and I understood why he’d gravitate to those people.

But I was furious with him. For dying. For leaving people like me, who had looked up to him. For making us feel like even if depression netted us — and it hadn’t, not yet, but surely it always lurked as a possibility, if everything went wrong at once — even if it got us, we could survive. Could swim away. He had tried to kill himself and recovered, we all thought. He’d even written and spoken about it, allowing everyone to believe that this thing was conquerable. And it turned out it wasn’t, not for him, and now he was dead. And I knew I wasn’t family, friend or lover; I was just a mediocre student from a school he was supposed to speak at, but I was so angry at him. And sad. Mired at an age I didn’t want to be, he had made his age, to which we were all heading, seem palatable. Doable. And then he had chosen to die instead, rendering the entire future, no matter how financially or, seemingly, soulfully successful, of suddenly questionable value. And I hated him for that, even as I cried as I passed the caution tape on the floor where he’d died; even as I stepped around the heaps of flowers and candles other students had piled there. I was crying, and shaking from terror at the 100+ story climb down, but I was so, so, angry.

And now, awake, I am somewhat out of sorts. Embarrassed by the solipsism of the dream letter — oh of course, girl, make it all about you — and wondering if I felt the same way after David Foster Wallace died, before enough time had passed for his name to become a meme, a way to point to the kind of people you’d dealt enough in life and hoped never to have to deal with again.  Or after I heard about Takeshi Kitano’s suicide attempt (over a decade after the fact), or Philip Seymour Hoffman, or…I don’t know. Anyone I respected who chose to die instead.

Baby boomers are always wringing their hands as their pinup people die, mostly it seems out of fear of death themselves. Since they’re the same age. But when a host of people you looked up to choose to die, it’s not the same. Even if it’s totally personal, or tied up with addictions, or medications they were supposed to take and skipped, it looks, to the pining, shiny-eyed idiots on the outside like me, like a verdict. They saw the future, and it wasn’t worth sticking around for — despite having done, and continuing to do, so much that mattered — and they checked out. And that is so (albeit it, I know, deeply, unforgivably selfishly) infuriating. How dare you throw in the towel. How dare you give up. How dare you, even completely unwittingly, maybe, tell us we might as well do the same.