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. 

How else will we read the world?

Hello, he said. What you reading?

Elisabeth showed him her empty hands.

Does it look like I'm reading anything? she said.

Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

Autumn, by Ali Smith, is a joy.

There's so much joy in this book, despite some heavy matters throughout, like Brexit and dying and the inability to effect change and the absurdity of our day-to-day and how feminist icons have been dismissed by the establishment and how we forget, but Smith's writing is so light and gentle and funny, and there's hope and love and joy. And wordplay. It's about how we tell our stories. There's fear and awe (and love and joy) in discovering that people have lives quite apart from the narrow contexts in which we know them.

The novel follows Elisabeth, a lecturer in art history, and traces her relationship with Daniel, an old songwriter and art collector, her next-door neighbour when she was a little girl, who is sleeping away his final days at a care facility in the town her mother has moved to. Because Elisabeth visits Daniel regularly, she sees more of her mother too. The United Kingdom has just voted to leave the European union, and there's something in the air.

I read Winter, the second book in Smith's seasonal cycle, first. I don't think that matters — they're set more or less contemporaneously, with a small bit of character overlap. Both books brush up against Shakespearean tales. Both books describe acts of protest and resistance.

Both feature long-forgotten women artists, in Autumn's case, Pauline Boty. Many readers see the discursions on art as incidental, but I suspect they're quite central to this cycle. I think Smith is reminding us to listen to what women say through art, that it could be quite different than what you think it is, and it is important.

A great many men don't understand a woman full of joy, even more don't understand paintings full of joy by a woman.

I'm tired

I'm tired, she says.

It's only two miles, Elisabeth says.

That's not what I mean, she says. I'm tired of the news. I'm tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren't, and deals so simplistically with what's truly appalling. I'm tired of the vitriol. I'm tired of anger. I'm tired of the meanness. I'm tired of the selfishness. I'm tired of how we're doing nothing to stop it. I'm tired of how we're encouraging it. I'm tired of the violence that's on its way, that's coming, that hasn't happened yet. I'm tired of liars. I'm tired of sanctified liars. I'm tired of how those liars have let this happen. I'm tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to anymore. I'm tired of being made to feel this fearful. I'm tired of animosity. I'm tired of pusillanimosity.

I don't think that's actually a word, Elisabeth says.

I'm tired of not knowing the right words, her mother says.

—from Autumn, by Ali Smith.

Post-Brexit novel, indeed.

Beauty in desolation

Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

— from Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer.

This passage should give you an idea of why it's being called eco-horror. Annihilation is creepy, but also surprisingly beautiful.

This reminded me of a conversation in Ali Smith's Winter (the books are talking to each other again!), though it stands in stark contrast to it:

Beauty is the true way to change things for the better. To make things better. There should be a lot more beauty in all our live. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. There no such ting as fake beauty. Which is why beauty is so powerful. Beauty assuages.

...for which comments Sophia is roundly ridiculed, but she suggests they tell each other the most beautiful thing they've ever seen.

This got me to thinking. I see beautiful things often enough. But the most beautiful? Today I'm thinking it's the parking lot forest of dead Christmas trees. An act of art. Beauty in desolation.

What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen? (Was it in desolation?)

An exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again

Ali Smith's Winter is an easy, beautiful thing.

By easy I do not mean simple. Winter has a lot of depth, but the writing is so effortless, so at ease.

It's Christmastime. Art is committed to visiting his mother, Sophia, for the holiday. He's expected to bring his girlfriend, but they've broken up (she's holding his Twitter account hostage for control of his blog, "Art in Nature" — blogging is dead, don't they know?), so he hires someone (an immigrant) to act her part. When they arrive, they find Sophia not quite herself, so they invite her estranged sister Iris (they're polar opposites) to help.

Sophia has had a disembodied child's head following her around. She's not telling anybody about it, but she doesn't know what to make of it. It's not haunting her, but she seems haunted by it; she's shutting down.

What ensues is late-night conversations at the kitchen table: some Brexit talk, old resentments, family secrets, past love, all the related wounds, a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth ("It would be good to be full of holes, she says. Then all the things you can't express would maybe just flow out."), and a great love of Shakespeare. In other words, a perfect family Christmas.

All the deadness that so hooked me at the novel's opening turned out to be quite a clever trick. What "is dead" is Google autocomplete.

Thinking about Charlotte is also a waste of valuable energy and to free himself from it and from her he is now going to go out into the streets of this city and find, wherever he can, a handful of earth
(is dying
is divided into twenty four
is doomed
is destroyed
is dead)
so as ceremonially to hold in his hand nothing but soil, a handful of it breathing at its own rate, slow and meditative and completely itself through all the anger and the rot, earth itself, to remind him of it stilling to hard and frozen when the temperatures fall and thawing back to pliant again when they rise. That's what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten stat it brings you. So gentle Art will look for literal earth. City earth. He'll look in the places where the city trees meet the pavement; sometimes there are patches of earth round them if they haven't been rubbered in under that bouncy plastic stuff. Nature is adaptable. Nature changes all the time.

This is the first book of Smith's that I've read, and I hadn't even finished it before I placed a hold on her other novels my library carries. You don't have to read Autumn to appreciate Winter.

Nesting Stones, by Barbara Hepworth

Reading Winter was like reading Doris Lessing at her finest — just the right blend of political activism and domesticity. And art and love and feminism, a fantastical element or two, and, you know, life.

Winter is real.

Some insightful reviews
Financial Times:

Yet Smith, for all her characters' dismay at "post-truth" culture ("like walking in a blizzard all the time"), never becomes a slave to topicality. Her many-layered artistry softens rage or sorrow. These novels seek to bring our time and deep time together. "That's one of the things stories and books can do," says the sort-of-hero as, flashing forward, we glimpse him reading Dickens's A Christmas Carol to his child: "they can make more than one time possible at once".

The Scotsman:

Winter is a novel in which the cold also reveals clarity. Things crystallise. They become piercing and numbing at the same time. It is a book about being wintry in the sense of supercilious and hibernal, in its sense of wanting to shut the world out. The characters have to deal with both impulses, and deal with them in different ways. But the end result is a book that makes one think, and thinky books are rare as hen’s teeth these days.

A great many things were dead

This morning it was -34°C with the windchill. Harsh, blowing snow. Tomorrow will be no better.

It's winter.

I'll be spending the weekend indoors reading, I think. What could be more appropriate than Winter, by Ali Smith.

It starts like this:

God was dead: to begin with.

And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead.

Love was dead.

Death was dead.

A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren't, or weren't dead yet.

Life wasn't yet dead. Revolution wasn't dead. Racial equality wasn't dead. Hatred wasn't dead.

But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water.

Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower.

Ghosts themselves weren't dead, not exactly. Instead the following questions came up:
      are ghosts dead
      are ghosts dead or alive
      are ghosts deadly
but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn't a ghost story, though it's the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas (Christmas, too, dead) and it's about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead).

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this opening.

Of all the things listed as dead, I'd argue that twitter, instagram, and mobiles (at least in their smart incarnations) are not, though they are losing relevance quickly. And racism, not dead. (The rest I won't take issue with.) I assumed a current-day setting, but perhaps this list intends to nudge the timeframe slightly ahead.

Or dead is meant allegorically. Dead inside.

Dead of winter.