Can fragility feel as hot as bravado?

In bonsai you often plant the tree off-center in the pot to make space for the divine.

This concept is new to me. It makes me reevaluate space, white space. I reconsider my aesthetic tendency toward asymmetry. What am I leaving space for? What am I making space for? Meanwhile, all those situations where I require the fullness of symmetry, do they have no need for the divine? Are they already divine in themselves or are they shutting it out?

I've come to The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson, too late in life, my life. It might've affected me more impactfully a couple dozen years ago, when I was pregnant and grappling with my body, motherhood, and relationship dynamics, all in constant flux, but it hadn't been published yet. It might've served me a decade ago, upon its release, as I processed my life to that point, and prepared for my rebirth as a single woman, single mother, singular entity. 

Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one's "normal" state, and occasions a radical intimacy with — and radical alienation from — one's body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)?

As it is, I found this book frustrating; it made me feel both very smart (I have the wisdom of lived experience, of birth and death; I have known seven or seven thousand types of love, my heart has shriveled, grown, burst, reconstituted, softened, hardened, shattered, scarred, mutated, evolved; I have lived in my body across time and space; what can this book tell me about love, grief, identity, adaptability, responsibility, joy, that is new?) and very dumb (I don't know this academic language, these references or frameworks; I don't know what Deleuze said, I know Lorde the jaded pop star, not Lorde the intersectional feminist and civil rights activist. I understand my experience and express it in a way limited to myself and my own experience).

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it.

I was listening to a radio show, writers discussing favourite books, or major influences or recommended reading, and what now brought me to The Argonauts and hooked me on reading it was mention of "Wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained — inexpressibly! — in the expressed," so here I am again, still, forever unable to articulate what's in my head, heart, soul, yet somehow assured that it doesn't matter; whatever I need to say is seeping out of my pores, obvious to anyone who cares to listen to my silence. Read me, I scream, without having written a word.

I had always presumed that giving birth would make me feel invincible and ample, like fisting. But even now — two years out — my insides feel more quivery than lush. I've begun to give myself over to the idea that the sensation might be forever changed, that this sensitivity is now mine, ours, to work with. Can fragility feel as hot as bravado?

(The answer is yes. This is something I absolutely know to be true.)

Meanwhile this summer, my daughter went on vacation for over a month. It's the longest we've ever been apart. The emptiness is a strange feeling, a bookend to the fullness of pregnancy. A sneak peek at the empty nest syndrome I will someday soon endure, and I begin to understand how biological mothers may experience it with a certain intensity. An evolution in one's physical space, and the new emotional states that introduces. Although partnerless now for about a decade, I haven't lived alone since 1996; I am mostly very good at being alone — for an evening, for a few days, on vacation for a couple of weeks — I crave it, and am almost never lonely. Except sometimes. But solitude done right, strength at its core, is indeed a gift.

I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one's solitude right, this is the prize.

The balance of self and other, when both are shape-shifting and changing direction.

But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependence. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again — not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

The gradual loss of hope

There's no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven't heard its music, I haven't seen its painting, I haven't read its books... I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence. There is nothing we can do about it.

I first came across I Who Have Never Known Men, by Belgian writer Jacqueline Harpman, in a review I read about three years ago. I noted the title (a terrific title, the English title having been updated to more closely reflect the original French upon its republication in 2019), and moved on. Suddenly this summer I see it everywhere — bookstore clerk favourites, best books read this year, recommended reading. It's not a special order; it's in stock. Even my library has it. Its resurfacing is a sign of the times.

Originally published in 1995, the novel feels older than that, like an unearthed artefact. The writing/translation is not exactly dated, but it somehow feels not of now. A bit ponderous and expository to start. I was slow to buy into the narrator's recollection of her prepubescent self. She is the youngest captive; she alone has no memory of life as it once was. Then the questions start to bubble up.

Like: Why are they imprisoned? Where are they? Who are their captors? Why are there no signs of civilization? Is it an alien planet? Where did everyone go?

And: How would we really live without men? How do we preserve and pass on knowledge, or acquire it from scratch, when technology is gone, when people are gone? To what end, that knowledge? How and why do we keep time? What makes a lived life? How do you keep going when all hope is gone?

Forty women find release from their subterranean cage and then ... nothing. They find other bunker cages filled with corpses. Sometimes it's men in the cage.

Not so much classic dystopia as existential mystery with a feminist slant. Competent-enough writing and characterization for a novel of ideas.

I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.

The eighteen ways of calculating the volume of a three-dimensional object

You can't understand something you haven't observed for years. She nodded. You understood some words only hearing it many times. You saw some things only after looking at it many times. Most things were like that. Especially things that remained for a long time in her heart. It was the same when she was looking for materials. Blowfish were alien to her, something she's never handled. Observing something for a long time was the first step toward comprehension. She'd learned that at the beginning of her art career.

Melancholy, introspective, and thoughtful, but also confusing and painfully slow reading. It's a mysterious force that pulled me through to the end of Blowfish, by Kyung-Ran Jo. Quite possibly I need to observe it for a much longer time to comprehend it. Kind of a love story, as two (nameless) lonely, haunted people connect.

She wasn't used to feeling the need to buy something; it made her uncomfortable. A bamboo cutting board, a tea set, leather shoes and a bag, a dinosaur robot with sensors, a hefty notebook she picked up and put down sever times, a feather pen. An object's initial power was in the way it drew out possessiveness. A feeling that began with ordinary desire. She had been thinking about the power inherent in objects, and a part of her thoughts had been devoted to the special objects at the center of her work. "Not now," she murmured, then realized that everything was hurtling toward the end, despite what she told herself.

The main protagonist is planning her own death, by poisonous blowfish. While her intention is clear, her motivation is less so — maybe fate or art. Although she is a celebrated sculptor, death is more central to her character than art, and philosophical reflections on art are reserved for her friends and colleagues.

Most of the works explored daily life and personal emotions, avoiding the question of What is sculpture? and What roles do objets d'art have? Some works were dramatic, others were lighthearted. At this moment in time, an artist's inspiration and philosophy seemed more relevant than grappling with the essence of sculpture. These works interrogated the boundary between what was sculpture and what was not. Saim had long been interested in the boundary between painting and sculpture, in how the divide between three-dimensionality and two-dimensionality was becoming fuzzier, and how that gave rise to experimentation and exploration. 

The supporting protagonist's story is told in alternating chapters. (This format was initially confusing for me, as the characters do not have distinct voices.) He is an architect.

Forget about perfectly straight red bricks; when morning light fell on buildings built with warped or damaged bricks, it was almost overwhelming to witness their powerful beauty and dynamic character. A house whose bent, cracked, missing, twisted, and protruding parts looked all the more striking and glorious in the sun. Standing there in his brother's suit, he stacked red bricks in his mind, one by one.

Sculptors and architects have a special relationship with space, and what transpires within or moves through any given space has its own volume, density. I wanted more from this book than it offered. Neither character carries much weight (maybe that's the point? learning to occupy space?). I did not care if the sculptor lived or died; I did not care if the architect found meaning, or love.

Still, he needed to say what he felt. He needed to tell her that love was three-dimensional, that the volume of this three-dimensional thing was difficult to figure out. He heard creaking at the bottom of the stairs. Why did he only now feel the need to tell Sinae these things? Quiet footsteps crossed the hallway. He remembered her silhouette, the woman who had seemed to limp with every step. He heard his door open. He squeezed his eyes shut. He began thinking about the eighteen ways of calculating the volume of a three-dimensional object.

Kyung-Ran Jo in conversation (The Korea Society)
Review (Korean Literature Now)

It is — what it is

He sighed. Sighing is the worst form of breathing and I try not to do it myself but I admit it's hard. Sighing is something we struggle to unlearn. (from "The Air as Air")

The stories in An Oral History of Atlantis are funny and weird. I laughed and nodded along. I was so looking forward to a new book from Ed Park; the only disappointment is that it's not a novel. 

The star of the collection, in my view, is "Well-Moistened With Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts." (And I would love for this story to be a full novel.) An archeological dig, funded by a mysterious foundation, consisting of 18 women all named Tina, on a nameless and drifting island, with a mission to collect samples and translate "oracle bone script" — they wanted never to leave.

We contemplated sending him some saucy photos, the Syllabic sybarites draped languorously over pottery shards and lexicons, feeding one another thumb-sized grapes, but that plan could backfire: it wouldn't do to waste a resource as precious as film. So we pecked out letters on the rusty old Remington, asking the Foundation to consider the value of establishing permanent scholars on the island. A final draft was produced. Then we realized there was no mail service. I volunteered to type out five more copies. These were sealed and tied to the legs of birds we'd befriended. We showed them a picture of our benefactor and hoped for the best, releasing them into the giant Rothko painting that was the sky at twilight, salmon over slate.

As for the language of symbols they were intent on deciphering, "everything could mean anything, as well as its opposite. You had to pick which side of the contradiction to embrace, or else record the whole unholy snarl itself." One day a Tina falls ill and leaves, and a replacement is sent, the Anti-Tina. "All poetry is accuracy," she said.

In "Eat Pray Click," a writer of "pure Sensibilism, with a shot of Mood Writing," devises a Kindle hack (or virus) whereby a book is revised on every reading.

Basically, he longed for a text that wasn't set in stone, something more akin to a living organism — a story with free will. He didn't like that books started on the first page and ended on the last.

"Where's the freedom in that?" he'd say, in letter after letter.

"The Gift" describes a charismatic prof's Fundamentals of Aphorism lectures at a community college and recounts the occasion on which the now heavily overused tautology "It is — what it is" was uttered for the first time in recorded history.

Not a weak story among them.

The Stories 
A Note to My Translator  (at 0:56 of audiobook preview) 
The Wife on Ambien (in The New Yorker)
Machine City 
Seven Women 
Two Laptops (more or less)
Thought and Memory
Eat Pray Click (or Easter Promenade)
Slide to Unlock 

Review

A fucking tyranny of fast-held shapes

Yet once they halted in their relentless cataloguing, recording, reporting … wasn't there so much to give them pause? Hadn't one, in the wet slurp and roll of a glinting dark body glimpsed for just a moment in a natural canal, had to impose a species name on what could not, could never, be intuited from such a glimpse? Wasn't the prickle of unease crawling up the back of their necks tied to some actual shadow in the night? Some distant muttering while they slept?

Drunk Boat called it, roughly in the same month, in a different context, "the null effect — to create a something from the nothing in the darkness, the mind betraying you every time." This directed with a nudge at Man Boy Slim, of "the way the human imagination fills in the gaps."

The "sample" material, however, is actively defying the idea that it might to be catalogued — whether it is the evolutionary result of environmental or artificial factors on indigenous species, or something invasive from somewhere that will not stand for our paltry human attempts at identification, let alone understanding. "Manifestation of the foreign entity."

[I have been wanting to catalogue the plant life in the ruelle, the vegetation beyond the fence of my terrace, under my bedroom window. I feel compelled to document it, preserve it, nurture it. The grape vine is choking out the wild flowers. The raspberry bushes have little fruit this year, perhaps because of the dust and trauma of the construction next door, or maybe the workers are eating them all. So many leafy stalks I'd like to identify, I want them all to thrive. I want to replicate them in clay and display them so that the interior wall reflects the exterior and preserves the record of its evolution.]

Jeff VanderMeer's Absolution is wild. I'm not sure I understand what happens in this book, but it doesn't much matter. This is dense reading that moves from general uneasiness and a creeping eeriness to intense dread. Shades of Solaris with its doppelgangers who mimic, but also fulfill an expectation, filling in a gap in the humans' perception or understanding, and also the zone of Roadside Picnic, where different rules apply.

The first section of Absolution is a prequel occurring some 20 years before the three other Southern Reach books to date, recounting a mission to the Forgotten Coast. Skip ahead 18 years to Old Jim's cover story managing the village bar while reviewing that old mission and keeping an eye on the Séance & Science Brigade. And then a fresh perspective on the First Expedition.

[My rue plant, the one keeping the squirrels at bay, was for a day home to four black swallowtail caterpillars; one fat caterpillar cannibalized the others.]

Area X has its own physics of space and, seemingly, other dimensions — "past, present, and future collapsed into each other." Absolution casts the events of the original trilogy in a new context regarding what is or was known, and what can possibly be known.

All Old Jim could be sure of is that the biologists' sense of time and reality had been obliterated and put back together differently — and that this had harmed them beyond repair.

I had a hard time getting into this novel. I gave up on it once months ago, but now I was determined to soldier through, despite recalling next to no detail from the other books, except the feeling, the existential horror. But I have already circled back to reread Absolution, before revisiting the rest of the series.

[The hydro workers meanwhile are chopping branches of lilac and serviceberry. The birds don't visit the way they used to; I don't blame them. Yesterday a sparrow flew into the airspace of my covered terrace and hovered, homed in on a spider hanging by a thread before snatching it.]

Is anyone absolved? The biologists are absolved of their duty. Old Jim is absolved of his guilt, from living with guilt. Lowry is absolved of humanity. 

Undulating waves of wolves, but made of black liquid and slurping their way across like liquid lava fire, and no that wasn't it but the sight defeated the eye like an eye defeated an ear and a tongue because he needed to see the enemy, not taste or smell them.

By then, Lowry has snorted and swallowed a lot more drugs from Landry, thank the gods. So maybe he was shouting at the liquid things that seemed so joyous in how they could dissipate and re-form and why couldn't all in life be like that? Why did anyone have to commit to just one fucking shape. It was a fucking tyranny of fast-held shapes and what if he just wanted to be a circle or an oval with no end and no beginning?

I've been denied a destination

It gradually dawns on me that I've been denied a destination, caught in a transitional environment, a space between beginning and an end. What I see towers benedictive above my head, and is certainly not Honoré-Beaugrand terminus; I know this now.

Here stands a structure whose purpose was made for people. A space with a very clear intention. Deserted. Forgotten. It's weird, I think. I don't know. A space made for travelers, void of such motion, and I cannot dispose of its perverse emptiness.

I'm dwarfed by the scale of it. 

Every bit of it is carved into rough, angular lines. There are no curves, save for the semi-circular handrail gently churning over the newels of the escalators at their landing thresholds. Few of the ceilings are flat. They soar up, forty, fifty feet and cut at odd facets, sometimes meeting in neat triangles, other times disseminating into geometries that make no sense.

Fluorescent lights flood from everywhere, emanating a faint buzz, but still the place seems dark as though oneiric: a disturbing cast of greenish colour-temperature diffused through protruding beams and slanted balconies, their grooved ceiling lines, as though fingers dragged through the sand, but no, there is nothing natural about this place. 

This subway station, like any city structure, is a space entirely constructed by humans. Even city parks, gardens, and manufactured waterways, which seem to us wild and natural, have been girdled and domesticated by the hands of urban planning. The unpainted concrete, the entirely exposed interior, a vivisection of a body, peeled open like a fruit, its anatomy set on display — I've never seen anything like it. Brutalism is so utilitarian, so institutional. It moves directly against nostalgia. So how is this place then so nostalgic? Why is it both so familiar and so alien? And from where does this nostalgia arise for a place I've never been?

Therein lies the incongruity. There is something dissonant about this place, and it's more than just the look of it. It's the sense that this space was deliberately created to guide busy lives through it arteries and ventricles — passageways for passengers — and in this moment, they are empty. Just for me.

From the moment I came across Coup de Grâce, by Sofia Ajram, as a Kobo 2025 Emerging Writer Prize finalist, I wanted to love it. Subway platforms, stations, tunnels are excellent settings. They have a pulse all their own. Take, for example, the opening passage of Patrick Hamilton's Slaves of Solitude, which sets the urban backdrop for that very modern affliction called loneliness. Or the obvious metaphor of the underground and all that lies beneath in the more conventional gothic horror of Anne Hébert's Héloïse.

But I didn't love it. My inner grammar nerd stumbled over awkward constructions. The Montrealer in me puzzled over the bridge bisecting the rails at Charlevoix, a description that doesn't jive with the station I commuted through daily for years. I put my copyediting hat on to devise a better way than italics to indicate "point final" was to be pronounced in French (to mean, Period. Full stop. — a very anglo Montrealer expression of emphasis), when italics further along the same page were used to serve another purpose and the words themselves do not scream of foreignness. Clearly, I have peeves.

Passages like the above tend toward repetition, and would be better reined in. The journey is relayed in a confident voice, perhaps overly so (or compensatorily?), for a character grappling with depression. The narrator is mostly put off by how this unexpectedly encountered labyrinth at a terminal metro station has put a wrench in their plan to do away with themself à la Virginia Woolf. Toward the end, the format shifts toward a choose-your-own-adventure style, which, although it can be seen as evidence of the narrator's lashing out, feels disrespectful to the reader. 

There's a lot of attitude here. Some of it is "style," some of it feels like anger (but the novel never directs it at anything in particular). A good editor and a dose of humility could help make this a writer to watch.

Walking was writing

(though stillness is another kind of movement; it affects the ground, even if not the wind)

The house I grew up in used to be across the street. That is, it was originally built across the street from its current location. They built the school, and they needed a football field, so they picked up the house and moved it. Coincidentally, the man who lived in the house was the principal of that high school, its first, so presumably he took no issue with the expansion of school property, in fact, probably viewed it as a tangible evidence of his professional legacy. They named the street after him.

Today I also live across the street from a high school. They say we repeat patterns, our parents’ patterns. I repeat my house patterns. I live across the street from the school, behind which run the train tracks. I hear the train sometimes when I lie in bed at night. My dwelling before this one and the one before that were also about the same distance from these tracks that curve through the city. I wonder sometimes if my migration pattern is triangulating, or circling in on something. 

The house I grew up in also has railway tracks run through the block it sits on. They are no longer in use, but when I lived there, I heard the trains, saw them sometimes too, I don’t remember if it was morning or evening or when I came home at lunch, they must have stopped traffic, the tracks swerve across our block to straighten out on the middle of a main street, I don’t remember the traffic, I was oblivious to some things. Funny, I remember the trains but only ever moving in one direction, due east, and then southward toward the border, I wonder if they ever came back. 

The house I call the house I grew up in is the house I lived in for only about seven years, but they were big years, the years of primary and middle school. It was the house I walked to school from and then returned to. We still had a black and white tv. The house the neighbour knocked on the door of to say he thought it was our kitten that had been run over on the next street. It was the house my father died in, the house my brother and sister separately each moved out of, and each moved back in again, the house where a baby squirrel dropped into our kitchen via some duct from the attic, the house with odd creaking noises, sometimes I was scared. The house you could climb out the bedroom window and sit on the roof of the addition. It was the only house on the street with a driveway, because it had a stable in back.

The school’s parking lot was across the street from the school, that is, on the same side of the street the first principal’s house was moved to. The parking lot was irregularly shaped, it did not touch our property, but you could glimpse it through the bushes at the back of the next door neighbours’ garden. I would cut through the parking lot sometimes on the way to the grocery store, or to Cathy’s house, but because of its shape, it wasn’t really a shortcut. Every spring, I would go into the far corner of the lot to tear down some lilacs for my mother for mother’s day. The first time was with my dad, and after he died the lilacs continued to seem like a good idea, my mom loved lilacs. It was only the last year we lived there, or maybe the last two years, that I thought to bring scissors. Probably my dad had, that first time, but in the intervening years I struggled, you can neither snap nor pluck a lilac branch, and this difficulty somehow expanded the illicitness of the operation, the lilacs were not public, and were not the school’s property, they breached the fence that separated a neighbouring garden from the fleet of cars, I knew they belonged to someone else and I liberated them anyway, but it was messy and violent.

I have a lilac tree outside my bedroom window now. Until last week, there was another tree symmetrically flanking my terrace, but it fell victim to a construction fence, or the construction workers, or the school’s expansion and revitalization plans. The building I live in now was built on concrete stilts. This winter we learned, as heavy machinery tore through the old annex building, that our basement has no wall. We stood on the sidewalk and peered into the cellar like it was some cutaway dollhouse, like I could just reach in to extract the garden chairs rather than lug them up the rickety ladder, through the trap door, across my art space and the dining room through the sliding doors.

Hyeseong Cho, The Silence 230914-1

Somehow all this helps to make Houses of Ravicka, by Renee Gladman, make sense. All this, and having travelled to places where there are no street signs, or you don’t know where to find the street signs, or the building numbers aren’t in order, or you discover a place you want to return to but you can never find it again.

First, I left my invisible structure and then I walked. No, first I breathed to descend my structure and then I set out to walk. My immediate neighbors did not seem to notice that my living differed from theirs in that my flat of rooms existed in a geometric impossibility. My rooms opened and closed depending on how air moved through my body, and their rooms did not open and close. For a long time, before I understood my breath, I was stuck in one strange light-filled room. [...] When I'm at home, everywhere I stand is the center space, a space surround by objects, and no matter how far I walk in one direction , the room comes and settles itself around me, until I breathe and am in another room, the room for sleeping, the room where I draw. [...] Living was like writing a long, immersive essay: inside something fluid and labyrinthine, where light shined in at odd angles, even during the new moon. Sleeping was a terrifying pause in writing. Walking was writing. Each room held an essay you wrote as you breathed and the subject of the essay usually had nothing to do with the function of the room, but maybe the room's architecture, for that day, was shaped by the quality of your thinking. First I breathed the steps to my house, and then I descended them. 

For more sensible commentary on this odd novel, see The White Review.

Coincidentally, while preparing to visit my hometown, I browse online for local art galleries and discover an artist who paints street windows and sudden walks. She cites an encounter with Franz Kafka's "The Street Window" as a window onto her perspective, an exploration of the "sudden exposure to the scrutiny of myriad gazes." I hope she's read Gladman, because the happy accident of me discovering her while reading Houses created new doorways for me to step through.

Gladman writes in the afterword:

I was now saying something about [architecture] that allowed me inside structures, no longer running my hand along the exteriors or standing outside looking up at the verticality of them but inside now, occupying space that is not visible from the other side of the wall.