Chalk dust supernova

Days are getting shorter. Like I'm running out of time for things.

We're having a heatwave. The city phoned me yesterday with an automated message to tell me so, and remind me to stay hydrated. I'm tired of drinking water, I want to hydrate from the outside. Thunderstorms this evening have turned the outdoors into a sauna. Maybe it will break by morning. Maybe not.

On Friday we took the metro to visit my sister. The ride itself was mostly fine — not nearly as many people as I'd feared, though only about half were masked. It's only on coming up from the platform that my daughter felt the heat of the day and the closeness of her mask and she fainted in my arms. I struggled to ease her to the floor without smashing her heavy head. A worker cautiously offered, from several respectable metres away, to call someone for help but I waved him off. In time, a long time, more than an hour, we walked the few short blocks to my sister's place. Hours later we called an Uber, all our exposure-risk aversion outweighed by the simple desire to be home. 

Saturday morning I popped out to the bakery for fresh croissants for breakfast, and a baguette for later. Like the world was suddenly normal and I could do what I want.

I've been feeling ill myself. Today is the sixth day. It's my period, but it's not my period. It's not a dehydration headache, it's not a tension headache, my head barely hurts at all. I want to call it a migraine but it's not, it's a feeling of overwhelming nausea radiating from the tension in my back. Maybe I just need a massage, someone to touch me, someone to fuck me. I am self-diagnosing existential angst, and prescribing something I can't have.

I catch myself worrying that the mushroom is sentient and has deliberately released spores to infect my household with a malleable and unnameable condition from another century.

I feel like there was a lesson to be learned in lockdown, and we missed it. Our minds are fogged. We're not thinking clearly.

The pool in the park is open for business, and I'm mildly horrified. Already at its revised reduced Covid-era capacity, over a dozen people awaited their turn to go in. I feel like I'm underwater.

There are remnants of egg on the sidewalk a few doors down. I thought someone must've wanted to see just how hot it was, but then I realized this pastey mass was surrounded by millions of fragments of shells; someone dropped a single egg. Over the days, the matter has diminished, as if it has sunk into the pavement, the ground has drawn all the water out of it, all that remains is something like a chalk dust supernova, coated in a glistening golden eggwash with a shell mosaic halo. I feel like the egg.

I've been watching things. I May Destroy You makes me wonder about things I may have forgotten. Normal People, much like the novel, makes me want to be at university and in love (yes, I know that's not what it's about). And then there's the little Polish Netflix series that keeps flashing back to the summer of 1994, the summer I was actually in Poland, and I drink my wiśniówka and sing along, wondering what reality I left behind there.

I have acquired a stack of quarantine books. These are them, all the books ordered and picked up or delivered in the 104 days I've been staying home. I have spent the evening fondling these acquisitions in a desperate attempt to distract myself from ordering more.

So far, I have read but one of them. In the meantime I read something big and sprawling (Gnomon), and now I need to finish a library book (The City We Became) before it vanishes into the ether, and another library book (Kim Ji-young, Born 1982) has just been checked out to me. 

There isn't enough time. I am stockpiling for the second wave.

I have walked myself into my best thoughts

You're not built from the soles of your feet up — it's more like your head is a "castle in the air," with scaffolding reaching down to the ground.

I started reading this book in pre-pandemic times, and set it aside to focus on other commitments. When I did pick it up from time to time, it made me angry. Trying to write about it now makes me angry. For all the wrong reasons. But I'll get to that.

In Praise of Walking: The New Science of How We Walk and Why It's Good for Us, by Shane O'Mara, is an informative and even inspiring book. I first heard of it some months ago when I stumbled on an article confirming what I've always felt, ‘It’s a superpower’: how walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier, which excellently summarizes the ideas the book puts forth and may be enough for some readers. 

A good portion of the book is very sciencey, exploring the evolutionary necessities and advantages of walking.

We are exceptional walkers, possibly the best walkers of all species. 

And then it gets neurosciencey, explaining the brain activity that accompanies this particular form of physical activity, and why it's good for your well-being, bodily and mentally. The subprocesses at work even get a little metaphysical.

But the extra factor that helps us find our way is that humans are good at ruminating on our pasts and imagining alternative futures — a capacity that is probably unique to us. The brain's GPS system taps into this and allows us to engage in mental time travel — via memories, or imagining alternative futures. This is a map of time, rather than space, but it is equally essential. 

Walking is a way of being in the community. It is a social and a political act. It can mean to walk with someone and for something. It can be an end in itself.

The greatest achievement of this book is to serve as an argument for city planning to consider pedestrianism and "walkability: cities must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting."

A more walkable city, in straight, is a city that benefits us all in so many obvious and occult ways — obvious, because walkability adds to our health and well-being; occult, because walkability has so many hidden benefits for creativity, productivity and enriching our societies.

I was happy to learn that those dirt trails we tread into the grass have a name: desire paths — the beaten path from here to there that eschews poorly planned pavements, betraying the fact they were designed by people who think of public space as ornament, by people who live in suburbs, by people who prefer to drive.

[Unleash my body and my soul to imprint all their desire paths on the world.]

For a meandering view of walkability, see The Guardian's series, Walking the City.

O'Mara notes that Kierkegaard wrote that "Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it." Kierkegaard grappled intensely with the existential despair of life and love; he did not, however, have to contend with the conditions of pandemic lockdown.

I miss walking. I walked to go places, and I walked for pleasure. The city under quarantine was encouraged to get out for some air, some exercise, and suddenly my world was invaded. My private pastime, my secret pleasure, was appropriated by everyone who used to work and dine and drink without taking particular note of their trajectories.

Walking is different now. Avoiding walkers and joggers, people lined up on sidewalks at pharmacies and hardware stores, people on sidewalks stopped to talk with people in their doorways. To maintain physical distance is engaging other brain functions — logistical calculations, risk assessments. Coupled with a general pandemic-onset panic reflex, walking is exhausting. And clearly, there are not enough sidewalks and green spaces for all of us to enjoy as we should.

I want to walk again, let my mind fly.

But mind-wandering is not mere idleness or time-wasting, at least by the common understanding of the term: rather, it is a necessary part of mental housekeeping, allowing us to integrate our past, present and future, interrogate our social lives, and create a large-scale personal narrative. If mind-wandering is idleness, it is a peculiar and active form of idleness — we are behaviourally quiescent, but mentally vigorous.

I do my best critical thinking and emotional processing when walking. I synthesize my reading, I formulate my writing. I find myself, and I own the ground I walk upon. 

Malice, saved up against the day

I am unable to concentrate on work this past week. I sit and stare at my laptop for hours. Not cooking or cleaning or distracting myself with productive (if personal) endeavours, I sit and I stare, and I stew about it.

I continue to learn German on Duolingo. I haven't missed a day in a over a hundred days. But even this I don't do during work hours. Diese Katze ist mein Chef, nicht mein Haustier. 

Something catches my eye at the base of the large houseplant, I've had it for years, like a crocheted cat toy that might've flipped into the pot. Only we don't have such cat toys. It's a mushroom, slender-stemmed, pale yellow. My research yields conflicting information — it's dangerous to the plant and the immediate environment and must be eradicated versus it's a healthy symbiotic relationship that should not be disrupted. Where did the spore come from? Did it pry its way through the window screen? Did it sneak in one morning when I opened the front door to greet the day? It puts me in mind of a passage in Tokarczuk's Primeval, and I wonder if it came purposefully to slow down time for me. Perhaps it imbues my tiny queendom with a magic power I've yet to discover, perhaps it will lull me into a quiet death.

I don't read much. I don't blog. Occasionally in the evenings my eyes wander over the jigsaw puzzle — Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights in 2000 pieces. I look at each piece as it constitutes the whole, and marvel at the weirdness of tangled limbs and futurist architecture. Why would birds care so much about these naive humans to feed them? 

On Thursday I went for a walk. It was windy. The wind makes me restless, so I walk and walk. When I walk around the lake in the park, the trees bow down to slap me. Early afternoon and the park is reasonably sparse. Some people sleeping on benches. Some people staring into the void. 

It's hours before I return home. I give up on work for the day. I sit on the balcony and read Gnomon. The wind roars along the ruelle like a sea monster, I feel like I sit just below the current, barely safe. I want to take off all my clothes and let the wind ravish me, but the wind doesn't even know I'm there. 

Across the way, a woman is yelling into a void, what would you do without me, how would you take care of her, you do nothing, you think lawyers' fees are more important than spending time with your daughter, you should be fighting to spend time with her, you come and go at your convenience, what if something happened to me, what would you do. I saw him once on the balcony with the baby. It's heartbreaking, and I cry for her, and for me too, thanking her for saying the things I should've said years ago. 

I lean across the table and kiss him lightly upon the brow in benediction, and feel something unknot in me that I hadn't know was tied. Malice, saved up against the day, but never really anything I wanted. I let it go. 

Benedicite, Augustine. You silly arse. 

It's like releasing a heavy sack. I feel muscles in my chest open and unlatch: freedom. I catch my breath at the feeling.

Leaving made a velocity

I, Hazel Brown, eldest daughter of a disappearing class, penniless neophyte stunned by the glamour of literature, tradeless, clueless, yet with considerable moral stamina and luck, left my family at seventeen to seek a way to live. It was the month of June in 1979. I was looking for Beauty. I didn't exactly care about art, I simply wanted not to be bored and to experience grace. So I thought I would write. No other future seemed preferable. Let me be clear: I did not want to admire life, I did not want to skim it; I wanted to swim in it. I judged that to do this, I had to leave, and to write. I wanted to speak the beautiful language of my time, but without paying.

This is how The Baudelaire Fractal starts. I'm stunned by it, it's stunning. This is what happens when a poet writes a novel, Lisa Robertson, I should look her up. 

It's also beautiful, printed on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, whatever that is, kind of creamy, textured almost lined, makes me want to run my finger along all the words, manufactured acid-free from second-growth forests not far from where I now sit.

Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitude for melancholy, I left houses, cities, lovers, schools, hotels, and countries. I left with haste, or I left languidly. Also I was asked to leave. I left languages and jobs. Leaving made a velocity. I left garments, books, notebooks, and several good companions. Sometimes I left ideas. After the leaving, then what? I suppose I would drift. I had no money and no particular plan. Cities exist; hotels exist; painting exists. Tailoring also, it exists, as anger exists, mascara exists, and melancholy, and coffee. I liked sentences and I liked thread. Reading surely and excessively exists; also, convivially, perfume and punctuation. I had a fantasy and my diary. I had my desire, with its audacity, its elasticity, and its amplitude. I carried a powder-blue manual Smith Corona typewriter in a homemade tapestry bag. I was eager, sloppy, vague. I wore odd garments. I carried no letter of introduction, and I knew no one. I was only a girl bookworm. I wasn't to stay. None of this troubles me much. The nervous fluid of a city is similar to a grammar or an electric current. Loving and loathing, we circulate. I myself did not exist before bathing in this medium. Here I become a style of enunciation, a strategic misunderstanding, a linguistic funnel, a wedge in language. Here I thought I'd destroy my origin, or I did destroy it, by becoming the she-dandy I found in the margins of used paperbacks. What do I love? I love the elsewhere of moving clouds.

I started reading this while resting in the new park I discovered, a sunny afternoon under cottonpuff clouds. I don't know how I came to stumble on this novel, don't ask so many questions.