Time drips off our bodies

She says I'm like those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element. No one knows where they came from. Not even they understand how they're still standing and why they never break down.

This is why she calls her Boulder. 

Boulder, by Eva Baltasar, was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker. The cover is stunning. Weirdly, I spotted this book at a local magazine chain store, which sells only a few dozen titles in English. So I was inspired to finally check it out.

Highly poetic. It feels wrought. A narrator whom I found entirely unsympathetic; she's a bit of a selfish dick, really. 

The eponymous Boulder, a loner, a literal drifter, a merchant ship worker. 

An old woman passes me the bottle with a smile in each eye and a toothless grin. I take it and drink. I love this place, thee narrow black eyes that neither desire me not reject me, this fabulous freedom.

But she meets Samsa and falls in love.

Time drips off our bodies, trickles between our legs, we tack it to the walls.

They move to Reykjavik and buy a house. (But they could've lived anywhere. Icelandishness does not really play into this novel, except for the narrator observing that "Icelanders are slaves to biology, breeders," which I'm not convinced it true.)

Boulder is about a relationship that changes when prospective parenthood enters the equation, and then some more with an actual baby.

It's Samsa who's desperate to have a child. Boulder acquiesces, but she is increasingly at a remove from Samsa, even while watching her with desire.

She's having an Italian morning, her body is soft and full, she smells like fresh bread, like a sponge left in the sun, like tomato plants.

Although Boulder depicts a same-sex relationship, the challenges, particularly those of physical intimacy, are typical of any marriage. (I'm not sure what makes this an "incisive story of queer love" other than it's like any other kind of love?)

It vividly brought back to me the anger, exhaustion, resentment of the early years of motherhood, with all the negativity stemming from and directed back at my (now ex) partner. I mean, I relate to the biological mother in this story, and I'm raging at the narrator for closing themself off, for making excuses, for being self-centred and weak (and in my case, I believe, ultimately inconsequential).

I realize there's a living thing seated inside me; in fact it's lounging around and whistling as it watches the sky slowly descend as if dancing. I'm always surprised by the lack of guilt in that place where love, which always pushes outward, meets solitude, which always pulls inward. My love doesn't leave with Samsa, but it isn't part of me either. It belongs to desire. 

Although the novel clearly tapped into a particular point in my past experience, this style of writing (imagine a poetry reading; hear the affectation and portentousness) is not my cup of tea. I can't think of any individuals to whom I'd recommend this book, but on the other hand it could make for a rich bookclub discussion. 

Excerpt.

Boredom is meditation

Everything that happens inside you during the time you remain seated, silent and motionless, is meditation. [...] Boredom is meditation. The pains in your knees, back, and neck are meditation. The rumbling of your stomach is meditation. The feeling that you're wasting your time with bogus spirituality is meditation. The telephone call that you prepare in your head and the desire to get up and make it are meditation. Resisting this desire is meditation — giving in to it isn't though, of course. That's all. Nothing more.

I like Emmanuel Carrère. I've been meaning to read Yoga for some time. I've been meaning to read a bunch of things by him for some time. On reflection, I realize that I've read only rather a small sampling of his work — a novel, a memoir, and an erotic essay. That novel, however, The Moustache, deeply affected me, and I would rank it as a favourite. Another book of Carrère's goes by a title I made up myself for a collection of stories I'd imagined while waiting on the subway platform (alas, I'll find another title if I ever write those stories). It seems to me that we, Emmanuel and I, have compatible views of the world; we ask similar questions of the world and of ourselves.

I've always found yoga interesting (since I first experienced it at age maybe 11), and I enjoy practicing it (although I've never pursued it regularly let alone zealously, and I am currently out of the habit altogether). Like Carrère, I think of  yoga not as a form of gymnastics, but as an introspective exercise, dare I say spiritual (though "spiritual" feels too intangible); I'd like to call it a way of being, but that invokes too much a granola lifestyle, some kind of mindfulness, meditation of the body (those are my words, not Carrère's).

The body has three hundred joints. The blood circulates through more than sixty thousand miles of arteries, veins, and capillaries. There are forty-six miles of nerves. Unfolded, the surface of the lungs would cover a soccer field. Little by little, yoga aims to become acquainted with all of this. To fill it all with consciousness, energy, and the consciousness of energy.

Yoga, for Carrère, is a form of meditation (or is it vice versa?), classified along with tai chi. He offers several definitions of meditation (but not of yoga), about two dozen or so, though I'm too lazy now to search them out and count them. Most of them variations on a theme, refinements. My favourite may be this: 

observing the points of contact between what is oneself and what is not oneself.

The language of yoga fascinates me. I once started drafting a blog post about it. Those soft-toned phrases, less instructions than incantations. Open your heart. Lead with your heart. Root down to the earth with the three corners of your foot. Put your mind in your feet.  Breathe into your cells. Create more space inside. (Inside of what exactly? And more space for what?) The meditation guide tells me, "The body is designed to move, the mind is designed to wander," while I am expected (by whom?) to restrain the body from moving and the mind from wandering.

This book, Carrère's Yoga, is not about those things. Not obviously, anyway. Had I known what this book was about, I might not have read it. At least, not now. It's mostly about a breakdown Carrère suffered, lengthy and intense, sandwiched between the Charlie Hebdo shootings and his time in Greece giving writing classes to (mostly) Iraqi refugees. While breaking from reality fascinates me, and it is the subject of much of the fiction I choose to read, real-life accounts of severe depression aren't really my thing. 

Nevertheless.

Carrère embarks on a meditation retreat in a remote corner of France — 10 days of silence. (This kind of journey has a great deal of appeal to me, and I occasionally indulge in researching such opportunities.) 

The question — and this isn't the first time I'm asking it — is whether there's an incompatibility, or even a contradiction, between the practice of meditation and my trade, which is to write. Over the next ten days, will I watch my thoughts go by without becoming attached to them, or will I instead try to hold on to them, which is the exact opposite of meditation? Will I spend the whole time taking mental notes? Will the meditator be observing the writer, or the writer observing the meditator?

Early on it becomes clear he doesn't make it through to the end, and we wonder why he breaks the silence, is it the silence that breaks him? In fact, his retreat comes to an end due to entirely external factors. He is called away on a matter related to the shootings, of which he and the other 100 or so retreat participants were entirely ignorant, while everyone else in the country was actively distraught. The taxi driver offers some perspective: "If you'd known, what would it have changed?"

Behind the scenes are a crumbling marriage and a transportative love affair that came to an unexpected end. Carrère is diagnosed as bipolar and sinks deep: long-term hospitalization, ketamine, electroconvulsive therapy. 

For everyone, being in love is a sort of manic phase, the most desirable of manic phases. [...] If I don't want to cause suffering, love is now forbidden to me. No more love. No more enchantment of being in love, the best thing in the world.

Carrère comes out of the hospital and ends up on a Greek island, we're not entirely sure how, and maybe neither is he. Everything seems a little dulled. It seems to me that he dwells on love, or the lack of love, or the desire to love, the inability to love. He describes a story told by Roger Caillois in The Uncertainty That Comes from Dreams, an arrangement between lovers (that resonates with me as ideal):

In this bubble of space and time, totally sheltered from the outside world, everything is desire, softness, tranquility, understanding between bodies, murmured conversation. They both know that nothing like this would be possible if they lived together, as they've sometimes thought of doing. It's in secrecy that their love unfolds, and they both believe that, protected in this way, it will last forever.

Then one day, he can't find the street where she lives, or any trace of her. He realizes none of it was real, it was all a dream — but the distress is real.

(Tangent. Some thoughts relevant to me right here, right now: "Dreams are extremely intimate: to encounter our work life there is to suffer the invasion of the professional at the very heart of our personal life.")

Ultimately, I believe this book, Yoga, is about love. I think love is a kind of meditation (or is it vice versa?). Maybe because love, at its best (worst?), blurs those points of contact between oneself and not oneself.

Carrère reflects on the successes of his life,

But the essential, which is love, would have escaped me. I was loved, yes, but I had not learned how to love — or hadn't been able to, which is the same thing. No one had been able to rest in complete confidence in my love and I would not rest, at the end, in anyone else's. 

And that is his greatest tragedy (and maybe mine). I believe the enchantment of being in love really is the best thing in the world. When we don't have it, a survival mechanism kicks in; we delude ourselves into believing it's not so important. But love is everything.  

Excerpt.

To do 
Consider "Recession," by George Langelaan.
Track down The Uncertainty That Comes from Dreams, by Roger Caillois.
Take up tai chi (again).
Explore the work of Giorgio de Chirico. 

Remember Glenn Gould's maxim: "The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."

What is history?

What is history? So it is asked, repeatedly and pointedly, in Same Bed Different Dreams (no comma), by Ed Park, a readably maximalist metafictional alternate "history" of Korea positing that the Provisional Government established during Japan's occupation of Korea operates to this day, its ultimate aim being a unified Korea. Fact, perception, memory, imagination. Drawing connections and filling in the blanks.

Pop quiz (in the guise of mandatory corporate security training):

After Japan's defeat in World War II, Korea was divided into North and South across the 38th parallel

A. by someone in the U.S. State Department who had to find a map in National Geographic because he wasn't exactly sure where Korea was.

B. and the animosity between the Soviet-backed North and U.S.-backed South led to the Korean War — the "Forgotten War."

C. where no border existed before.

D. or was it?!

I read most of this book two-handedly, in one fist my ereader, in the other my phone, ready to check names and events against popularly recorded history (and I really messed up my algorithms in the process). The problem with reading alternate history is knowing enough actual history to be able to discern the deviations, and to be honest, what little knowledge I have about Korea is limited to K-pop and M*A*S*H

"It's said that the Korean Provisional Government is more a state of mind than an actual governing body." Park reveals foundational members, secret members, anticipatory members, and undercover operatives of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG), among them Isabella Bird, Leon Czolgosz (assassin of President McKinley), poet Yi Sang, Harold Sakata (who portrayed Bond villain Oddjob), Douglas MacArthur, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus Christ, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ronald Reagan, Younghill Kang, Thomas Wolfe, Maxwell Perkins, Richard E. Kim, and Philip Roth.

The history of the KPG is presented in the form of a manuscript titled Same Bed, Different Dreams (with a translator's note about deleting the comma), read by writer Soon Sheen, whose day job, much like mine, mostly consists of navigating (sometimes literally) a techmegacorp, and trying to figure out what the hell their job actually consists of.

Park's Same Bed also asks (literally), "What is a book?" Concerning Syngman Rhee's The Spirit of Independence, one of the secret bibles of the KPG,

Few readers can remember where all the chapters are, which means the book is often encountered out of order. More important than the book's contents is the fact of its existence: that it has been composed in extremis, cut up, and concealed.

This novel is a celebration of fiction, intertextuality, and, in a roundabout way, good editing. "The problem with being a good copy editor is that the world will always be in error."

One main narrative thread concerns the sci-fi series 2333 (so named either to honour the fictional author's wife's birthdate, or to call out the legendary founding of Korea in 2333 bc; personally, I can't help but think of 2666; and apparently in Chinese it's the equivalent of lmao), pulp fiction space adventures written by a PKD-admiring Korean War vet, and serving as inspiration for a couple of game developers, with the resulting software folded into the algorithms of the aforementioned techmegacorp.

This novel bounces from the tragic (suspicious?) death of Kim Jong Il's little brother at the age of about 4 to the circumstances of the destruction in 1983 of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by Soviet Air Forces.

Despite its concern with Korea, it's dense with Americana. It follows Betsy Palmer (who eventually starred in Friday the 13th, which has an imagined backstory rooted in the Korean War and its aimless violence can be seen as an allegory of American intervention; also one of Kim Jong Il's favourite movies). It trails Ronald Reagan (who ratted out communists and eventually became president). It documents their encounters on gameshow I've Got a Secret. It plays JFA on a loop (that's punk band Jodie Foster's Army, whose name was inspired by John Hinkley Jr, who attempted to assassinate Reagan).

(Palmer also dated James Dean, regarding whom we have this wonderful sentence: "Half of him is falling apart at the seams while the other half insists there are no seams.")

Also hockey lore. One short chapter division is named after my hometown, being where Tim Horton crashed and died (and I've been craving a cruller since reading those pages). Because of course Same Bed covers the history of the Buffalo Sabres, whose very existence is tied to the KPG, evidenced through their 1974 11th-round draft pick — "nonexistent" Taro Tsujimoto of the Tokyo Katanas (why are they called the "sabres" anyway?), and culminating in Park's dramatization of the fog game, featuring a bat swooping down from the arena rafters. Apparently, you can't make this stuff up.

I am inspired to see Friday the 13th, a film I didn't think I'd ever watch, even though Same Bed has given away the entire plot and ending. 

Yura insists that the film is as deep and beautiful and disquieting as anything he's seen. That it's a dream masquerading as the ultimate horror film. A poem of grief. 

It was early pages when I gave up on grasping the intricacies of occupational and international politics, and simply gave myself over to this wild ride, a distorted fun-house version of history laden with conspiracy. Park performs pure magic.

To do
Procure a copy of Dictee.
Watch Friday the 13th.