"Without faith, there is no refuge," she repeated, and rang her small bell several times. The Full Auras saw the signs in the sky. The Diaphanous Spirits heard them in the buzzing of the insects, in the slightest shift of the clouds, in the plants' growth. The Minor Saints warned us with celestial song, and the Enlightened, the emissaries of the light, declared it to be acid rain.

The House of the Sacred Sisterhood was founded by Him (who only the Chosen and the Enlightened have the privilege of seeing) and the Superior Sister (they say she fought in the water wars).

A climate catastrophe has left the outside unlivable: contaminated water, toxins carried by the wind, extreme temperatures, the thick haze that lasts for days on end. Occasionally a hare is trapped but it's often a deformed abomination. The relentless chirp of crickets betrays their main source of protein.

There are three orders of the Chosen (mutilated).

The Minor Saints have ethereal voices:

After a dramatic silence, the Minor Saints resumed their song. I saw thousands of white petals leave their mouths, filling the air, lily petals that glimmered until they disappeared. Their voices can reach the universal notes, vibrate with the light of the stars. (That's why their eyes are sewn shut, so they're not distracted by the mundane, so they capture the reverberations of our God.)

The Diaphanous Spirits have perfect pitch. Their tongues are cut out when they are chosen, so they communicate in writing to the Superior Sister. 

They can perceive the bitter, lurking sound of sickness, the slow absorption of bone tissue; they've heard the soft swell of the dark where our organs reside; they can tell by our pulse whether our heart seeks only possession or wants to redeem itself, whether it seeks to wound or to dissolve into another heartbeat; they can discern the damp movement of the bacteria that inhabit us, the microcosm we carry around without feeling it. Sometimes they spend long hours in the field trying to detect human words in the wind, messages from God. It's common to see them turning in circles, the palms of their right hands open to the sky and the left to the earth. But no one knows why they do this.

With perforated eardrums, the Full Auras can orate purely. "God's messages leave traces on their bodies"; they have the gift of prophetic vision.

The Enlightened embody all the virtues of the three orders of Chosen. They are the mediators with the ancestral, hidden God, the one before those that men created.  

The rest are unworthy. Their continuous sacrifices are necessary for God to protect their small world. It is forbidden to invoke "the erroneous God, the false son, the negative mother."

There is a lower class still, the nameless servants:

They whisper poison because their bodies carry the marks, the signs, of contamination, and though they can no longer infect us, they have to work to clean our filth and the filth that runs through their veins. They hate us because they have to serve us. The marks are the remnants of the pustules, wounds, infections. The rashes are the filth of evil, the filth of collapse, the filth of failure. This filth absorbed from the sick earth has blighted them permanently, lest we forget that corruption lurks and the Enlightened are the only ones who can quell it. This filth, nesting in the servants' skin, in their cells, is the anger of the sea, the fury of the air, the violence of the mountains, the outrage of the trees. It's the sadness of the world.

The Unworthy, by Agustina Bazterrica, is an unsettling account of a sheltered postapocalyptic community. The unnamed, unworthy narrator secretly keeps a journal of the goings on while struggling to recall the path that brought her to this (un?)holy place.

One day, a new wanderer happens upon the Sisterhood. Her presence, her very being, seems miraculous, and she is instrumental in helping the narrator tap into her past (including a poignant, tear-inducing relationship with the enchantress Circe).

The beauty of the language masks something sinister (I'm reminded of Piranesi). The Sisterhood is built atop the destruction of the world and the violence of men. 

While Bazterrica's previous novel, Tender Is the Flesh, verged on the ridiculous, The Unworthy creeps toward the sublime.

Something nearly nothing

The empty house had the floor of one of its rooms strewn with flowers and a smell of earth and greenness all through its downstairs all night. Each morning for the next few days I scraped them up together, carried them into the garden and left them on the paving in the corner where they dried away to something nearly nothing and blew nothingly around in the paved yard for the rest of our time in that house.

Two teen siblings live off-grid, navigating difficult circumstances, with a slow reveal of the nature of the society they’re on the fringes of — a near-future dystopian surveillance state.

They don’t see the world the same way, and they come to exercise resistance very differently. 

Gliff, by Ali Smith, depicts a tender sibling relationship. It's also a love letter to language. (Because. Words are knowledge. And knowledge is power.) "It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean." Very Alice in Wonderland. Naïve, to surreal effect. "You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life, she said."

One of the epigraphs (from Valeria Luiselli) appears to apply less to the characters than to Smith's motivation: "it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity." Smith demonstrates a lot of clarity regarding the state of the world today — surveillance, data collection, real estate economics, manufacturing and warehouse practices, consumerization of education (and the devaluing of knowledge) — and there's good reason to be angry about it, as the gap widens between the haves and the have-nots. The privileged "were smoothed as if airbrushed, as if you really could digitally alter real people."

But Gliff clearly takes some inspiration from Aldous Huxley. Beyond the permutations of the words "Brave new world" heading the later chapters, there are nods to that dystopia's indoctrination methods and soma. 

She's still speaking: all took stuff. We had to, we all had body shit and we loved Patchay, best of the painkillers, just zapped it, blanked it out, blanked us out too. We all took it except her and she had this word for us, for it. She'd sit against the wall and watch out for us while we were on it, and she'd always say what we were was gliffed. We reckoned she was riffing on the old word spliff. So we all started calling it, whatever we took after that, gliff.

I love that Patchay is also a play on pace, Latin for "peace." 

[I hate that I can't google a confirmation that Smith intended this, as the AI that generates overviews is clueless, and Google expects me to articulate searches in natural language, and I resent that our natural language has changed to be something that machines can recognize, why in my job search do I need to build a machine-readable CV shouldn't you build a machine that reads what I actually need to say. I remember when I first searched terms on internet and they were boolean and unnatural in a different way, often my queries were simplified, broadened, but it was mostly using an artificial system of operators to frame my natural thought, I don't know what my natural thought is anymore, maybe I modified my search practices to conform to the principles of the technology in play, but before the internet I could walk into a library and would have to consider how my question, if I had one, might be categorized, what subjects it encompassed, what ideas intersected, and if I had a specific question, I could ask a librarian, or an expert, they might know, but more likely I would engage them in a discussion about the subject, and new information might come to light, and new associations would spawn, facts may be confirmed but ideas could be explored and pursued rather than shut down, our current "natural language" machine searches anticipate a certain kind of answer, the answer is already contained in the question. I wonder how our grammar is changing, you'd think it would be more careful, to formulate searches with more precision, how sensitive is AI to our grammar, surely it knows the rules of grammar but does it understand how sloppy we are and under what circumstances we tend to get it wrong, we're so dumb we won't even notice when AI misreads our question to answer something else entirely. When I'm searching for something, it does not necessarily mean I have a specific question in mind, I have what Edward de Bono termed a "fuzzy situation," a kind of (pre-?)word cloud in my brain, and I'm looking for associations more than answers, even if problem-solving strategies typically involve distilling a specific question from all the fuzziness. I guess my issue is that I don't have a problem to solve, a question to answer, I'm interested in exploring, and it occurs to me that this is, broadly speaking, a male-female divide (or it used to be, in an earlier version of studies on gender dynamics, fuck, how old am I, oh how angry am I, how much clarity do I have now), men fix things, women want to talk about them, and this is what happens when men fix the internet. For the sake of this rant, I reformulated my search as "is the naming of patchay in Ali Smith's gliff a play on the latin word pace and what evidence is there for this" and AI returned: There is no evidence in the provided literary analyses or reviews of Ali Smith's novel Gliff to suggest that the naming of "patchay" is a play on the Latin word pace. In fact, the name "patchay" does not appear in any of the search results, which extensively discuss the wordplay surrounding the novel's title, "gliff." I wonder if the search result will have evolved after this post is published to acknowledge my original thought, I wonder also about the comprehensiveness of the "provided literary analyses or reviews," who provided them, what do you know anyway.]

A lot is left unanswered. Was the siblings' abandonment deliberate or accidental? What's the other sibling's story when they part ways? Who's running this world? How did we let this happen?

Why would people do that? she said.

People are people, Leif said, people are mysterious, why does anybody do anything?

Excerpt. 

The size of our capacious ignorance

"You know why I love games? For the same reason I love literature. In a game... in a good poem or story? Death is the mother of beauty. He stopped and twisted to face me. "Know what I'm sayin'?"

I'd given up on Richard Powers. I loved The Gold Bug Variations. Everything else was lesser. The couple Powers novels I read after that masterpiece didn't hold up; maybe they were the wrong ones. 

But the promise of Playground tickled a few synapses I couldn't resist. The game of Go, a sculptor, generative AI, a Montrealer, a stolen library book.

Three main threads. Todd, recently diagnosed with Lewy bodies dementia, reminiscing about his early life. The tale of Rafi and Ina living idyllically in Polynesia, until political environmental concerns threaten their way of life. And an old oceanographer who broke all sorts of barriers for women.

I loved reading this book because it reminded me of how I used to read books. It reminds me that I used to read old white men, and that that's not necessarily a terrible thing. It took me out of my present when I needed to step out of it. Less interiority, more in the world. Despite being set in a near future with extrapolated technological advancements, the novel revels in good old-fashioned storytelling.

I love that Todd does jigsaw puzzles with his mother. 

My mother and I were building a time tunnel, not just back to the childhood I never had, not just to Constable's 1821, but back several millennia, to the first magic picture puzzles from history's beginning. That's how my brain works.

[A jigsaw puzzle figures in The Gold Bug Variations as well, defining two types of puzzlers: one who looks for the spot that fits a piece, and one who seeks the piece that fits a spot. I think of this every time I puzzle.]

In high school, Todd discovers Godel, Escher Bach. His best friend Rafi steals a library book (The Philosophy of the Common Task, by Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov), obsessed with its premise that evolution intends to defeat the design flaw of death, that humanity would someday learn to resurrect every person who ever lived. Rafi introduces Todd to Go. College begins with underground movies and poetry slams and being "schooled in the size of our capacious ignorance."

In the fall of our senior year, when the sweet gums turned burgundy, the maples went lemon and orange, and the oaks all over campus settled into shades of scarlet, when the daylight hours shrank and the air thickened with that sere, weird scent of anticipation, Rafi came back to our dorm room late one afternoon with an announcement. He smiled his most serene and philosophical smile, with his tongue in the slight gap between his two front teeth. "I've just met the woman I am going to marry."

Enter Ina, the artist, who keeps them together and tears them apart. Todd is on the path to super-rich tech bro-dom, while Rafi struggles to complete his thesis. 

He pulled passages from Johan Huizinga's classic, Homo Ludens: "At the root of this sacred rite we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of man to live in beauty. There is no satisfying this need save in play...." Judging from the lines he's sent, a stranger would have thought that Rafi was writing a thesis about games.

When Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, humanists took heart that a computer could never master Go. But in 2015, AlphaGo beat a human professional player.

If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.

Children. Mammals, pets, dolphins. Machines. The machines are undeniably getting smarter.

The games industry surpassed the movie industry in terms of revenue decades ago. In terms of cultural reach and influence, it grows stronger every day. By Todd's account, "Games now ruled humanity."

AI's next turn would be the greatest game of all: Wittgenstein's Sprachspiel. Powers is definitely onto something here. (And Wittgenstein just won't shut up this year.)

The novel is ultimately about the power of play, the power of storytelling, and how similar these two are. Playground filled me with joy and wonder, and reminded me of my past and future selves.

Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.

Excerpts  
Chapters 1 & 2 
Chapter 4 

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.