Anticipation, when it occurs, often makes me animated and expansive, as if I am perhaps reviving and honing my senses in preparation for the awaited object: yes indeed, the world is a scintillant and fascinating place when a half-remembered mystery leans within reach.
(Her Japanese tapestries. My custom armchair. A former lover. An old book.)
Be careful though, be very careful with flaked almonds; they are not at all suitable for morose of faint-hearted types and shouldn't be flung about like confetti because almonds are not in the least like confetti. On the contrary, flaked almonds aught not to touch one another and should be organised in simple patterns, as on the side of a pavlova, and then they are quite pretty and perfectly innocuous. But shake out a palmful of flaked almonds and you'll see they closely resemble fingernails that have come away from a a hand which has just seen the light of day.
There's a thing I read, and I thought it was in Pond, about a feeling that's like the feeling of having a neighbourhood cat that you see regularly and then you don't for some time, but you know it's there — a kind of comfort in and familiarity with the rhythm of a place — until one day you wonder if it's ok, I haven't see Simone all winter because it's winter but the time before that it had been a while and I was so relieved to finally see her patrolling her usual stretch of sidewalk, I'd wondered if she'd moved away or some other fate befell her. I think the worry was entirely my own, and not in the passage I was looking for, the worry came to me because it reminded me of Simone (Rosie has never warmed to her, Simone is very friendly, a bit of a slut really, with the sweetest little mew). Of course when I went looking for this passage I couldn't find it, just this bit about the cat that walks up and down the drive with you, but I can't think what other thing I've been reading that would evoke this tangential thought.
I won't be able to write emails like that again you see — that's to say I won't be able to write emails like that for the first time again. And that really was what made them so exciting — using language in a way I'd not used it before, to transcribe such an intimate area of my being that I'd never before attempted to linguistically lay bare. It was very nice I must say to every now and then take a break from cobbling together yet another overwrought academic abstract on more or less the same theme in order to set down, so precisely, how and where I'd like my brains to be fucked right out.
It is fitting that this library ebook should expire today, on the last day covered by my spa passport. The passport was unknowingly the smartest recent purchase I made (excepting the custom armchair [the perfect reading nook at last!] since my formerly favourite chaise longue just didn't fit this corner of the room, and this corner was just crying out for a place to sit with a book and a cat; and maybe the porcelain clay), a Christmas gift to myself, I've been going to the spa two or three times a week since, just to relax, I need help relaxing, I didn't know I was going to be laid off, lucky thing too because I've been able to go to the spa any time of day. I'd never really appreciated the sauna until I went to Norway where I'd exit the sauna to plunge into the North Sea, and this was loosely replicated again this past fall in Denmark. My local is a weird little spa, not sure whom I'd recommend it to, it's in an unsuspecting block building, an industrial commercial zone, but I can walk to it from my house in six minutes, which means I can go after dinner or when I roll out of bed in the morning, which is priceless, even if it doesn't have a view over a river and I have to walk past the tracks through the dodgy backstreet with the loading dock for the grocery store to get there. Inside is quite cleverly designed, you have no sense of the traffic that lies just a few metres beyond the slatted wood. In fact I'll bring Pond with me today so I can search one last time for that passage about the cat (maybe it's a dog, and I'm not suggesting that just because the narrator remembers a cat instead of a dog in a book she'd read, the dog was named Lynx after all, I think she's harsh on herself for misremembering, I think that was a perfectly fine detail to stand out, it's more tangible than actions and behaviours, it's only natural for the brain to fill in memories around a keystone, whereas in my case, I'm not frustrated with focusing on the "wrong" detail but that I can't find the source of it at all, this passage I remember may even be about a person, it's just that it reminded me of Simone, who happens to be a cat. Was it another book entirely? But I associate it with this one, and also I feel like I felt this feeling of association while at the spa, because this is the book I've spent most of my time with, albeit relaxed and unfocused time, an environment that nurtures looseness (of muscle, mind), a loosening of hangups (and associations), the brain fog shifts into brain fuzziness (altogether softer, kinder, warmer). Or is it possible I hadn't read anything at all to prompt this "remembered feeling"? My mind simply wandered to thoughts of home and the nieghbourhood and I thought of Simone, and in a bit of reverse trickery my brain associated this sequence to a passage I'd read rather than freely admit my thoughts went to Simone (not even my own cat!) of their own accord.
Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream.
One of the best things about reading Pond was that it led me to discover Claire-Louise Bennett's essay A Formal Feeling: Inside the world of Louise Bourgeois, which is stunning to me, stunningly weird as a review of a book or an exhibition or an experience, by which I mean beautiful, and it makes me think, for once, about how other people approach Louise Bourgeois and how art makes other people feel something completely different than what I feel, and sometimes it seems lesser and less valid, but sometimes it is more and deeper and I think my own thoughts are quite small by comparison. I think more reviews should be written that way.
I'm going to check out Checkout 19 now.
I think I liked sitting there actually; I think I felt as if I'd just come home from school on a Thursday. Nobody was taking any notice of me yet there was a lovely comforting sensation that beneficent things were being done for me somewhere. I think, as human experiences go, that is one of my favourite ones.
Excerpts
From Morning, Noon & Night
Reviews
Fiction That Will Make You Feel Pleasantly Insane (The New Yorker)
Hmmmm, Stylish (London Review of Books)
