The heartbreaking direction of nonexistence

...so the story essentially is in its form, the mode of its construction, the way it's laid out, its structural arrangement, from light to darkness, from hope to, you guessed it, hopelessness, like (hasty, sloppy, hurried writing, reader, granted, I recognize, but... no time, no time), OK, comrade, listen, the story is too beautifully conceived and, like, imaginatively narrated for me to be able to do it justice retelling it for you right now, but anyway, that's the gist of it, [from "Life Happened"] 

Sentence, by Mikhail Iossel, is a collection of stories whose conceit is that they are each one sentence long. Some are shorter than the really long ones, in fact, they're not even full grammatical sentences, they're fragments, but I guess they all tell a story in their way. Each story sentences the reader to being in the narrator's 4-year-old head, or his 8-year-old head, being a Soviet-born and Jewish, native Russian speaker but English writer, or being in the old professor's seminar, or a train carriage, I think they're all the same narrator, a singular narrator (not multiple narrators each with their own tale to tell and coincidentally all having the same voice, and sharing the same essential biographical characteristics with the author).

Our narrator takes the bus down Sherbrooke Street, or comments on it being an unseasonably warm day in Montreal, and so on, I love that, I love reading about places I know, and I do love Montreal. Oh, this is autofiction, but I have to think for a minute, what other men write autofiction, I am so used to hearing the term applied somewhat derogatorily to women's writing (oh but of course Knausgård, he of all the accolades, I don't know if they're deserved or not). 

The text is laden with parentheticals and editorial comments (like something something, needs a word here for rhythm) while he searches for the right adjective, verbal tics, and fresh phrasings ("a shoulder-shrug of a question in my eyes").

Some quirks are language-based, of course he has a Russian accent when he writes "an insane some of money" (and I google this expression as written only to discover how disturbingly common it is, and I question my knowledge of English now, surely we talk about "a sum of money" or "some money").

I happen to be reading the one-sentence story "Crying," a kind of staunchly political (anti-Trumpian) — the narrator, or writer behind the anti-Nabokovian narrator, dollop-bombs politics all over the story (can it be anything but a political story?) — dream fugue with a Roy Orbison soundtrack superimposed over it, when I remember I wanted to watch Trump's address to the UN General Assembly, it's already underway when I turn it on, he's droning on about the evils of migration, blurring the line between legal immigration and other forms and he tells the UN "your countries are being ruined" and I wonder to whom is he addressing this remark, surely not to all 193 member countries, all being ruined by migration, so who exactly does Trump mean? He boasts about cleaning up Washington DC, "Your wife can walk down the middle of the street with or without you, nothing’s going to happen." Is he addressing the secretary-general? It's clear he doesn't mean women are safe, he means your property is safe.

This story occurs on November 7, 2024, in the aftermath of the US election of Trump, but also being the anniversary of the Russian revolution, and it's a little bit that was then, this is now, how different but the same, but so very different, do we ever find a better life.

Unimaginable

Imaginable is real, we know as much, but unimaginable is even more so, since most people end up living the lives they could not have predicted for themselves when they were little.

Why did I choose the Al Jazeera live feed over that of, say, CNN (OK, I rarely bother with CNN online anymore because it's too taxing to find real news amid puff pieces and sponsored links, so many pop-ups, and everything is video, not text, I can't find what I'm looking for, maybe it's changed lately, I dunno)? But after Trump's speech the broadcasters review some highlights and then move to other news in the world and I am struck to hear them talk about Israel's continuing genocide in Gaza, as opposed to its continuing strikes, or continuing war, and this heartens me a little, that some people are not afraid to speak the truth, it's a fucking genocide. The narrator remarks that "now the tsunami wave of antisemitism is rolling across the world again," and that's true but that doesn't tell the whole story, how can he tell the whole story in just one sentence?

Anyway, some great stuff in here, I can't decide if it's all a little too much in the end, like an old man rambling on a park bench and at some point you need to make your excuses and go sit on a different bench on the other side of the park.

for as long as your aching heart remembers and holds on to the pain of this rejection, the pulsating red-hot flower of a wound in your soul won't heal, and there is no greater desire than that of a wounded person for another wound, to quote Bataille, so perhaps you should maybe, like, you know, just a suggestion, fall in love with someone else, [from "How to Write  Russian Sentence in English"]

I will pursue this reference, further investigate Bataille, it's relevant to my love story, all my love stories.

There's a story about leaving Soviet airspace, and one about living in a language other than your native tongue. Really all the stories are about those things, and "striving to express the inexpressible," which is a recurring theme these days (my living, breathing days), somehow Wittgenstein has seeped up to the surface, I never studied Wittgenstein, despite my area of academic interest. Wittgenstein was often invoked as a curiosity but never taken seriously, both in the philosophy seminars and in the linguistics lectures, but oh there was that Greek god in so many of my classes, he with the tousled hair and the sweaters, maybe it was always the same sweater (I see him now in my mind's eye, looking like a cross between my grade-school crush, who was actually Greek, and Derek, a designer I worked with decades later, in a confrontational stance with the metaphysics prof, his complete antithesis, who also wore sweaters, very likely the same sweater repeatedly, a cardigan misbuttoned, and while it may not have been stained, it gave off the air of being so — stained with his own effluences, magnified by his lecherous gaze upon the glorious youth of his audience — and with hair like Layton or Richler, but matted with grease, he was the size of both those men put together, I wonder where my fellow student is now, what has he grown into), he always brought up Wittgenstein, as if it were the one thing he'd ever read and understood and around which the whole world revolved, and all of us, even the profs would roll our eyes, but oh he was beautiful, years later I went to see the movie Wittgenstein at the Bytowne and I remember thinking it was kinda mind-blowing but also it didn't help me understand Wittgenstein at all. My sister gifted me a copy of Wittgenstein's Poker the year it came out (I think I made it halfway through, maybe I'll try again), but that didn't help either.

...yet toward the end, especially in the last few months preceding his abrupt fall into final stillness, some actually found it rather fascinating, in a limited way, to listen to his, uh, vocalizations, with their sheer whimsical meaninglessness, his fancifully and haphazardly esoteric verbal emissions, as ungraspable as the illusory fleeting shadow of some imaginary giant non-vulturous tropical bird's splendid multicoloured wing's passage, o life o life, google Gulag, google Gulag, a mixture of incomprehensible metaphors, striving to express the inexpressible, forever leaving the shore of the basic shared human understanding and transforming itself into a hermetic hermitic verbal cipher, wholly impenetrable first and foremost to his own disordered mind, a singular matter of extravagant guesswork and elaborate leisurely interpretations, vague surmises, groundless inferences, meaningless metonymies, all grading unmistakably in the heartbreaking direction of nonexistence, just a distant episode of a life thwarted and discontinued, full of senseless symbols and uninterpretable signs, sighs and silence. [from "Google Gulag"]

My fractured, menopausal insides

This week I cited a passage from a book I was reading (not this book) to a friend, and they commented how dark it was, with the implication that, these days, stressful as they are for me, perhaps I should try leaning into more positivity. But how do you know how optimistic or not a book is until you've read it? And just because I read dark things, it doesn't mean I wallow in them, invite them to drown me, I can still interpret them with wisdom and lightness, I won't let a book tell me what to do or how to understand the world (the book in question, which I have not yet finished reading, being precisely about ceasing to do so). Besides which, I like dark. (Why?) Despairing interests me, it feels real, I don't know if it's harder or easier to express than joy, maybe I still think of it as other people's pain, by comparison it makes me feel better about myself, but I'm drawn to it (as if I have something to learn from it, I dunno), I'm drawn into it, the cyclone of emotion, the eye of the storm, with the belief that I will reemerge, transformed on the other side.

The thesis is that literature cures the common cold, brain fog, and schizophrenia. It's an amiable undertaking about the possible benefit of reading literature. Novels are a warm poultice, a mustard plaster on your chest, a cup of herbal tea, my grandmother Rufi's chicken soup. Myself, I prefer books that give you styes. That carve stigmata on your palms. That catch in your throat and take your breath away.

I suspect Marta Sanz and I may have overlapping reading lists.

Sanz's My Clavicle and Other Massive Misalignments is a short, crisp, funny novel with, in my view, a brilliant title. Arguably it's more essay than novel, but it's very readable and relatable. It's so... of the body. Funny and direct, the protagonist's voice carries the reader along her journey to establish what is wrong with her, the source of interruption in her life as a menopausal freelance writer.

What I didn't realize is that menopause is not exclusively about a mutation that leaves you feeling less attractive. It's something much more intimate, something that's intimate and at the same time physical, that I would call "interior." The Change is something interior and explicit. It's not just a question of how you look: dry skin, gradual capillary poverty, spidery veins on the cheeks, bags under the eyes, grids of wrinkles like the netting on a fascinator. [...] The worst part is that menopause provokes a sense of vulnerability, which in turn makes you actually vulnerable. As if all the fibers in your rib cage tensed up and that constant tightening was keeping you from breathing. You don't sleep well, you don't defecate well, things don't smell the same, and food doesn't taste the same. [...] At night I get cramps in my toes that are nothing like those former involuntary movements, during orgasm, when that other, younger foot used to tense, then stretch, and bend and grow with pleasure until it broke the glass slipper.

Menopause is a problem. Currently it feels (to me) more problematic than periods, than managing contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, postnatal care (with or without depression), breast cancer screening, general sexual health — all with their related physical and mental pains, and their physical, mental, and social costs. And then let's not wash over the social, political, and economic frameworks in which we experience these problems (and yes, we experience them as problems). Unequal pay, childcare, division of household labour, the emotional labour of relationships, navigating the feminine hygiene aisle at the drugstore.

The female experience is a problem. And then we somatize it. But we go on.

I carry on reading my book, and as always when you read, you start to think of other things, and maybe that's the beauty of reading. Parallel thinking. Three-dimensional musing. Geometric shapes hidden inside snowflakes.

Currently, my tear ducts are misaligned and the associated usual emotional regulators are malfunctioning. That is, I want to cry all the time. Sometimes I actually cry, but it's the always wanting to — I sense it right now, this tensing around my eyes, a pillow of pressure on my sinuses, the sensation of welling up, brimming over — that feels uncomfortable. I object to saying that I'm feeling "emotional." I feel "hormonal." There is no sadness, grief, disappointment, anger, frustration. But yes, I occasionally feel panic and overwhelm. (When did "overwhelm" start being used as a noun?) Because life, my life. But I don't feel emotional, per se. (Not that I'm unemotional, that would be problematic in a different way.) It feels physical, a little like onions, but more deeply biologically seated. It feels, "emotionally," a lot like pregnancy, a kind of surge, gasping for life but from opposite directions.

The triggers are unexpected. I'm fine with formulaic movies, the tear-jerkers with their manipulative soundtracks, I don't flinch. It's when my friends casually launch the hard-hitting questions, like "how are you?," they really don't beat around the bush, that's when I crumble.

I feel tired, mostly mentally tired. But it is a reasonable response to my circumstances to feel this way. What puzzles me is that I should break now, the stresses have persisted for years, at least as many as since my last period. All of a sudden I can no longer store emotion in my body, there is no more room inside me, I have to release it.  

My family doctor is on maternity leave. Her replacement is young, male. I'd anticipated not being taken seriously, but he's kind. I sense I have the power to make him scared of me. 

We talk about ruling out physical causes, possible thyroid dysfunction. He proceeds to ask me the standard questions for diagnosing depression or anxiety. He asks if I feel guilt, and I respond reflexively, without thinking, without blinking, no, and I am surprised to realize that it’s true, that since my mother died — or maybe simply because I've achieved some milestone of maturity, satisfaction with my life, fulfillment of certain responsibilities — I am free of guilt (except for the general guilt of white western privilege). 

When I write — when we write — we can't forget our material condition. That's why I think every text is autobiographical and that sometimes our disguises — the sinuous, translucent fabrics that cover our bodies — are less modest than naked declarations. I'm not interested in photoshopped selfies. I care more about the unedited facial expression, before language cleans it up, whitening each tooth and smoothing each wrinkle. I'm more interested in the pipe than une pipe that's not a pipe. An autobiography is the consecration of reality and of spring, not the number of stiches required to suture it into a story. My style reflects my fractured, menopausal insides. And this discomfort in certain regions of my body — flatulence, hemorrhoids, fibroids — may be clouding my intelligence. Or maybe not. What I can say is that I still care a lot about how much I'm going to be paid for my work.

I love that Sanz tries to tease apart the physical and the psychological and the results are inconclusive. I relate to the narrator, who has lost confidence in her own strength, although I am faltering not because of pain but of general craziness. I read My Clavicle at the beginning of the summer, before my difficulties began, but I'm struck now by several passages anew. It crosses my mind that reading it in fact may have subconsciously tapped into my concerns regarding my worth (financial, sexual, creative) and precipitated the late manifestation of menopausal symptoms I truly thought I'd managed to escape, or perhaps more cruelly my psyche decided not to call them up but create them out of nothing, to demonstrate my susceptibility to suggestion and distract me from all my other worries, giving me a tangible (if ill-defined) focus for my frustration, yet deliberately less urgently worrisome and more ephemeral than, for example, last year's biopsy-necessitating post-menopausal vaginal bleeding.

And somehow amid all of this, I proclaim I love my life. I feel more like a maker than ever, whether I use words as my material or clay. I look upon all I've made — my home, my family, my work, my art, my self — with satisfaction.

My writing is an uninterrupted assault. In a conspiracy of pleasingly blasphemous words and anatomical language, my writing strips us bare, both me and others, young and old. I tear off our clothes, exposing our blemishes in a search for our immense beauty. And I find it.

Review: Chicago Review of Books

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?