Ideologically opposed to her own despair

I choose what I want to see. I know I am imagining this. I, in the here and now, am willfully abstracting my own history. Because? There are a number of answers to this but today's will be: I can never find my past where I think I've left it and, in his designated role as catalyst, he is the worst offender of all. He will never just lie down where he lay. I keep discovering him wandering around inside me again.

Strange Hotel, by Eimear McBride, is another in a series of slim, meditative novels I appear to be drawn to these days.

The prose is beautiful and easy, but this is not an easy book to read. One has to work to assemble the story.

Strange Hotel is a little like a pared down version of Helen Weinzweig's Basic Black with Pearls (but ultimately very different). One review says it's reminiscent of Joanna Walsh's work, including Break.up. Deeply interior.

We know next to nothing about the narrator — not her name or profession or why she's travelling so frequently to international destinations. We don't know what her days are like. We have only glimpses of hotel-based evenings, mornings, and middles of the night.

There's a neat thing McBride does in switching form third person to first person, I barely noticed it at first, but it is very deliberately meaningful. It's a lovely interplay of the past and present, how we become who we are. (And it tells me that if I'm aware of that, I've got a better shot at authoring my own future.)

She scans her body for some distracting wound to press but it's pretty well; even her mouth is not, currently, in need of a dentist. Her skin, despite her revels, bears not the slightest nick. Her shoes may be nondescript but fit so she has no grazes or blisters to attack. In short, she possesses no immediate means by which to hurt herself back into the clear. How she longs for that sky to be blue. But, ideologically opposed to her own despair, she contemplates a heavy blow to the wall instead. And the ameliorating effects of such an activity are: the gratifying click and bruise of knuckles. The pain shooting its ferns up into her arm. The slightly amazed exhalation, then the clarity behind. All very tempting, yet she does not permit herself this. There remains the matter beyond the door, and only with careful deliberation will she ensure it becomes appropriately resolved.

I'd been meaning to read McBride for years, and this new novel felt like the right place to start. I'd heard or read an interview that basically covered what's documented in this exchange in The Quietus:

I was writing about a middle-aged woman – which makes sense because I am a middle-aged woman – and how angry and bored I am by the tropes about, you know, what it's like to be a middle-aged woman and what our preoccupations are, the things we worry about and how we're supposed to behave.

So, yes, I really wanted to take back the notion that a middle-aged woman going to a hotel room to have some anonymous sex with someone is an act of self-hatred and self-harm.

So, being a middle-aged woman who is somewhat preoccupied with the notion of a middle-aged woman engaged in and enjoying casual sex, how could I not read this?

I was a little disappointed, then, to find this book was not so subversive as to let its narrator simply take pleasure. She satisfies a physical need while applying an emotional analgesic. (But I forgive McBride. After all, this is not my story.)

We learn that she's known heartbreak and grief, but we're never told the full extent of it.

While it's not exactly self-destructive behaviour she engages in, it carries an element of undermining her own pleasure, if not her happiness. It's not unconnected to her emotional past, and it's a conscious effort to maintain her current level of emotional well-being. She's afraid of falling in love again (I'm not), because it would be a betrayal of her "true" love, because it would be an act of forgetting, because it would open the door to the potential for fresh loss.

She has lingering concerns about whether anything exists beneath what she is standing on. And, let's face it, there's nothing like the threat of the abyss to make one reluctant about purposefully striding across an unfamiliar floor.

Reviews
Frieze
Pi
Interview: The Quietus

A creature of oil and mess and stain

Day 35. No baguette. My mistake: Too early to the grocery, before they'd received their bread delivery.

I am starting to find my groove. Yoga, jigsaw puzzle, German lessons. Work. Watch a movie, read a book. I could almost enjoy lockdown. Except for the part where I have to procure provisions.

Yesterday I ventured to the pharmacy. Hands sanitized, but stopped at the door. Questioned, instructed, and allowed in. (I hesitated, wondering if my list really warranted a trip. What did I need here that I couldn't get on my weekly grocery trip?)

Approach the counter, let the employee know what you want and he'll go get it for you.

Extra-strength Tylenol. Small or large?

Hair conditioner. Brand? I don't know. Whatever's on sale. (Can I smell it first?)

Cortisone ointment, I brought an empty tube. But I want the higher percentage.

Pads, do they still call them maxi pads? Mini pads? I need a pack of regular, and pack of long, or heavy flow. Brand? I don't know. I usually stare at the shelf for ten minutes wishing I had the gene for brand loyalty and trying to remember what I bought last time. (Have I really been doing this for more than 30 years?) He brings me a package. No, I want thin. (They still make non-thin?) No, not panty liners. Yes, that'll do. And a pack now for heavy flow.

Maybe toilet paper. How much is it?

And on it goes.

Some things, like cat litter and kleenex, I decide can wait till I'm browsing grocery store shelves myself.

Do they have any Easter chocolate left? Am I allowed to ask that? There are now two women waiting behind me. (Well, one woman is two metres behind me; the other is standing near the entrance, to ensure appropriate physical distancing.)

It's not often I have to articulate my shopping list and the micro decisions regarding size, brand, quantity. And in another language to boot. [I remember needing bandaids in Portugal, 1993. (And a corkscrew.) Everything in Poland, 1994.]

Still reading Eimear McBride's Strange Hotel.

While she may not consider herself to have achieved any particular greatness in life, it's been hard enough to keep on clocking those decades up. To get to her late forties has taken a lot of ploughing through. There may have been considerable work put into forgetting too — sometimes with more success than she cares to admit — but without those accumulations displayed in plain sight it would be as if she had never lived at all. She'll not stoop to clichés about the blank canvas of youth — despite, generally, subscribing to their truth. She's just not unhappy about being a creature of oil and mess and stain. She has been bitten and will bite and there is a life in her home, even when she is not around, which bodily exists and is true.

I regret not asking for smokehouse almonds. They're hard to find.

There was youth and then there was later

On the thirty-first day, I run out of the good scotch. I listen to Beethoven's Ninth repeatedly, with its Ode to Joy.

Last night I dreamt I was in Vietnam with a man I didn't recognize for a car parade I didn't care about. The man was a fool and his car was so white it sometimes looked black. While he enjoyed a hero's breakfast before the event, I waited for someone else to fall in love with me. I wanted to go see the cars lined up on the boulevard, so I stepped out of the hotel directly onto the beach. There was no road. The building extended out into the water, and several dozen loungers were set up but, oddly, not facing the water, rather looking along the sand and into the forest. The water was blues and greens I'd never seen before, with exotic trees on the beach leaning down to drink from it. I wanted to snap a photo, if I could just get around the corner of the building. The gentle waves are lapping at my feet already. I'm wearing white sneakers (in fact, I think I'm wearing tennis whites) and in my left hand is Strange Hotel with my index finger marking my place and in my right hand my phone poised to take a picture. My shoes are already wet so I step forward a bit further. And the current pulls my feet out from under me, I'm only a metre or two from the edge, and I can see the bottom, but I can't touch it, it's dropping away beneath me, and I think about dropping my book and my phone but already it seems too late and I wake up with a gasp.

Afternoon featured a live-streamed yoga session. I'm doing the seated cat pose and suddenly my cat, seated on the chaise longue directly in front of me, sleeping so soundly seconds beforehand, is very alert and looking at me intently, as if to say, what the fuck are you doing?

Sometimes she forgets all the places she's been until someone asks and she'll remember then. Then remember that what she's been regarding as bedrock has, in fact, acquired sediment. No, she hadn't been there once but now she has. The time for not knowing about it has passed, and often considerably, on. She likes to think this happens only about countries, allowing her to enjoy recalling that she had indeed travelled and is no longer the girl who's never been anywhere. When this happens it's a real, and valuable, pleasure but is also not the only occasion it happens to her. She keeps so little of her past bonded close that she frequently has cause for surprise. Here lies a whole slab of your life you've completely left out in the cold. Not on purpose, out of cowardice of shame. Not, in fact, for any good reason she can name. Except there was youth and then there was later but only youth got to dig its claws in.

She's heard it's to do with "getting older" or lines on the face, or greyer, or the hideous "thickening around the waist". It's about finding it harder to get pregnant — which she does not even want. It's having too many children or not enough. Being with someone too long or too long without. It's disparities in the workplace. Professional failure, or success. It is that despite everything, all that's been accomplished and all that's been missed and all the accretions of the life that's been lived, for a woman in her early forties, unhappiness is what's assumed to be in store. That, and the mandatory belief in a younger face behind her face which is the only place where the possibility of any happiness resides. She really admires the effort and co-ordination it surely required to make this belief as rottenly insidious as it is now. But she does not believe it and objects to the assumption she ever would.

The world does not want you to go into yourself, the instructor says.

We practice mindfulness. We practice yoga. Everything is practice.

This writing is practice. I practice German and music. My cooking is practice. I practice breathing. What the fuck are we practicing for? Will there be a show? Will I be good enough? I've been practicing for a lifetime. We practice to master something we can never master.

There's nothing to be gained by the gratuitous exacerbation of pressure.

The arches of her feet unclench

Twenty-eight days later. Every morning between 7 and 7:30, I hear a flock of geese fly overhead.

Once or twice a day, we hear an airplane. The girl and I look at each other and wonder: Who is on it? Where do they come from? Is it like this over there too?

Groceries today. A woman near me was roundly scolded by store personnel for shopping with her teenage son. She was aggressively defensive about her bad back, she can't carry all these provisions by herself. He was escorted to wait outside. I went off-list and bought jellybeans.

Guided meditation today. The guide's wisdom: The mind wanders; that's what it's meant to do.

Yoga today. The more I practice, the stiffer I become. As if awareness of my tension heightens it.

Everything today.

This week I'm reading Strange Hotel, by Eimear McBride. It could be a while before I find myself in a strange hotel.

There's not much she knows about that, pours, and does not spill a drop. Drink. She drinks it down with some considerable relief at outmanoeuvring her travel fatigue, the buzzing, the desiccating heat and its risk of a maudlin dusk. That's it right now, agitating her veins. Coursing through until the arches of her feet unclench — the most secret pleasure of drinking, she thinks, and unquantifiably nice. Her wrists will follow soon. Inevitably, knees. Loosed shoulders are desirable, if difficult to achieve. The key is to stop before it gets behind the eyes, after which all circumspection generally flies. That's tight-rope drinking. Tonight she will make the attempt — to unhitch from while remaining in possession of. This is her intention. Certainly, more is not in the plan and, unwilling as she is to expand on that, she had little difficulty in recollecting why. So, she will drink only until her musculature relents which, even from this starting point, will require some intransigence. She has the time for it though, probably plenty too.

Sonofabitch pinot noir today.