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."

So finely ground it appears homogenous

Duras, in Écrire, deplores that too may books are lacking in freedom. She admonishes writers for acting like cops, whereas writing is a breeding ground for delinquents. By being content with conformist little books, scribblers take pleasure in their own neutralization, they make books with no night, pastime books, books for travelling, not books that sink into the mind, not books that speak the dark grief of all life.

Ravenscrag, by Alain Farah, is a perfectly bizarre novel. Duras would approve.

I have a hard time summarizing its plot. And I'm not sure whom I would recommend it to, except as a literary curiosity. Only now that I've finished reading it, I like it more. This novel gave me a hard time, but that's a good thing.

I love that the narrator is reading Emmanuel Carrère's I Am Alive and You Are Dead. That he admires Jean-Patrick Manchette. That he plagiarizes William Burroughs's Blade Runner. I love that Umberto Eco is a character in this novel. I love the references to Edgar Poe and Lady Gaga.

I love that Rilke is quoted. (Why is it that everyone I read these days is quoting Rilke?)

Then there's the Bologna enigma, Aelia Laelia Crispis. That this is a mysterious inscription famously translated by Jung reinforces the oneiric quality of the novel.

[In] the novel I was then writing, I peppered the narrative, without knowing why, with references to the city of Bologna, whose name designates a mortadella so finely ground it appears homogenous, with no visible trace of the assorted bits from which it's made: pork snouts, rooster fee, beef anuses.

It leads one to think that the whole novel is bologna. Very finely ground. Admirably so.

Ravenscrag is weirdly reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. It's also a direct descendent of La Dolce Vita and Last Year at Marienbad.

Mind-wiping, the CIA, and some oddly anachronistic scenes that conflate 2012 with 1962 and 1912.

Ravenscrag is the name of the mansion that sits just up the mountain, atop of McGill. Today it's known as the Allan Memorial Institute. The novelized version has only half the rooms of the real-life prototype.

With some difficulty, I manage to leave Ravenscrag, with its architecture of thirty-six doors arrayed on either side of a long central corridor, none of which leads out of the building, as if one had to agree to invent a thirty-seventh in order to exit.

I feel on exiting this book that I am bound by a similar contract.

I want to read it again.

One of the most amazing people on Earth

I have a slight obsession with reviews of an unreliable biography about an obscure (at least to most Westerners) Russian countercultural dissident antihero with unpalatable politics written by a man who, if the other works of his I've read are any indication, examines the external world primarily as a means of examining himself.

According to Matt Taibi, "Edward Limonov is one of the most amazing people on Earth, the author of a few truly great books, a man who has lived a fuller life than any 10 of your most interesting friends combined."

Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia, a fictional biography by Emmanuel Carrère.

Matt Taibi, NPR:

Carrere wonders: What could Limonov be thinking? "Does it amuse him," he writes, "the outlaw, the mad dog, to play the virtuous Democrat?" He spends the rest of the book trying to answer the question: Is this last part the act? Or was it the earlier part?

Carrere struggles with that theme throughout, and in the end toys with a horrifying surprise conclusion: Limonov is above all else a failure.

Julian Barnes, The Guardian:

The conformist loves the transgressor, the bourgeois loves the punk, the careful man the adventurer; while the Parisian intellectual (see Sartre and "Saint Genet") typically loves the intransigent despiser of all that Parisian intellectuals stand for. Some, if not all of these themes play out in Limonov. [...]

Why, then, is he interesting? Flaubert, asked to justify his interest in Nero and the Marquis de Sade, replied, "These monsters explain history to us." Limonov is not a monster, though would perhaps like to think himself one; he is a philosophical punk, a chancer, a blood-and-soil patriot who imagined himself a cleansing political force. Carrère, reflecting on his subject's escapades, decides that:

He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag; I suspend my judgment on the matter. But ... I thought to myself, his romantic, dangerous life says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about everything that's happened since the end of the second world war.

José Teodoro, National Post:

Of course a writer wants to write about a writer who, to such an extraordinary degree, writes his life into being, writing always with audacity, always for maximum drama and dynamism, always working to ensure that he’s at the nucleus of the narrative.

M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review:

Carrère doesn't see himself in Limonov, but he sees them as kindred writing spirits, obsessed with themselves and presenting themselves in their writing. Significantly, Limonov has also lived the life that was closed to Carrère, because of his ultra-bourgeois background and limited experience. Carrère has a writer-crush on this buffoon who has 'lived' so much.

Rachel Donadio in The New York Times:

Some critics have found Limonov too flattering a portrait, though Mr. Carrère says he finds Mr. Limonov's politics unpalatable. "We are not on the same side of the barricades," he said, adding that Mr. Limonov told him, "If I were in power, I would send you to the gulag."

Michael Dirda, The Washington Post:

The book interweaves a social and political history of post-Stalinist Russia, chunks of Carrère's autobiography and a hodgepodge of reflections on art, sex, ambition, the punk aesthetic, fascism, mysticism and old age.

Interview.
Excerpt.

The most important French writer you've never heard of

The Guardian calls Emmanuel Carrère "the most important French writer you've never heard of," and I quite agree. (Except for all the important French writers I've actually never heard of.)

It's an interesting profile for a few reasons, which are maybe all the same reason.

1. Major themes are identity and memory. The Moustache was brilliant on these points. (There's a novel that has really aged well in my memory.)

2. He seems to have found his niche writing nonfiction novels. Whether he recounts episodes from his own life, or somebody else's, what's the difference? (Must get my hands on his book about Philip K. Dick.)

3. He seems particularly interested these days in exploring his Russian heritage, which interests me in hopes that it may shed light on my own desire to know my Polishness. Which has nothing to do with the culture per se, but rather the need to know from whence you come.

I stopped writing fiction and began to write "non-fiction novels." I tried to write about the world and about myself, describing reality through my own experience.

Check him out in interview with the CBC's Eleanor Wachtel (Writers & Company).

Life in Russian

My Life as a Russian Novel, a memoir by Emmanuel Carrère, recounts the author's attempt to film a documentary in the Russian village of Kotelnich, about nothing in particular. "The Hotel Vyatka [...] is one of those places familiar to travelers in Russia, where not only does nothing work (heating, television, elevator, all kaput), but you get the feeling that nothing has ever worked, not even on the first day." You get the feeling that the whole of Kotelnich is much the same.

Life is, as we all know, what happens while you're busy trying to make a documentary about something else entirely. Somehow, Carrère's book (and his film, apparently, too) managed to capture something of it.

She threw us out, but as we were putting on our coats, determined not to hang around any longer, she forgot about having thrown us out and wanted us to drink some more, talk, wanted to show me the curtains. She'd taken the curtains — with a design of red and green circles on a white background — from Sasha's and her daughter's apartment, curtains streaked with blood and brains. Galina had boiled them several times, so that most of the stains were gone, but not all, and she traces with a fingertip the outline of the brownish spots, more visible in the lamplight, and she draws the lamp closer so that I may see them. Look, Emmanuel, look, she says tenderly. It's the blood of my daughter and my grandson. Every time I draw the curtains, which protect my eyes from the moon and the streetlights outside, it's the blood of my daughter and grandson.

Life does happen in Kotelnich, but it's hard to nail it down. Fortunately for us, Carrère doesn't force his film in one direction or another; he keeps waiting for something to grab him by the throat, and if you wait long enough, it kind of makes itself.

The memoir feels a little bit more forced, in some respects. Carrère is ostensibly tracing his roots, wanting to know his Georgian grandfather and discover his mysterious end. To this end, Carrère does little beyond poking through some old letters his uncle kept, and while he harps on his grandfather's circumstances, his stance is not investigative. Merely, he's working out how to come to terms with his family's past and its dark secret. Frankly, the details concerning his grandfather bored me. The facts were spilled out quite dryly. Carrère is right to call that story "a tragedy, yes, but an ordinary tragedy," by which I think he means, all families have them, and this story is not any more special but for being his.

But there are two particularly fascinating aspects of this book. One is Carrère's reflections on his relationship to the Russian language, which he spoke as a child — his comfort level, how his fluency depends on mood and circumstance, that language is clearly more than academic and the problem of immersion is more than linguistic.

The other is his dissection of his relationship with the woman he loves and who for the most part is in Paris, while he is not. I previously read his erotic open letter to Sophie as a standalone piece, as originally intended, and found it, well, pretty erotic. In the fuller context of his domestic drama, however, it becomes a little uncomfortable, and you see that his intent was perhaps misguided.

They say Carrère is best known for The Adversary, which I have not read. But I did read Class Trip, which I don't remember, and The Mustache, which I loved, along with its movie adaptation. You don't need to be familiar with Carrère's other work to be swept up in this memoir. The story is in the telling.

Reviews
The Washington Post
The Complete Review

Sexy reading

I picked up Granta's sex issue a while ago as it seemed to feature even more than the usual lot of great and interesting-to-me writers. And, yeah, I guess I was feeling kinda sexy that day.

The Roberto Bolaño story, "The Redhead," is taken from Antwerp, so if you have a copy of that book, you don't need to search out this anthology for completeness. Barely 2 pages.

On the basis of the excerpt presented here, I've determined that, much as I loved The Keep, I have absolutely no interest in reading Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad. Zilch.

Similarly, there are a number of other authors I will not be seeking out.

After reading Tom McCarthy's story I've pushed his Remainder a little higher in the list of books I mean to get to real soon. I'm definitely interested in reading more of Natsuo Kirino, and possibly Victor LaValle.

Sex is, I think, hard to write about, and probably best tackled obliquely.

(William H Gass tackle the subject in On Being Blue, which was reviewed thus: "It's about sex and about language and about the language of sex, and how we're failed by language in writing about sex, and how we fail sex with language.")

It's a huge subject matter, of course — the coming of age stories, the sexual identity stories, the longing for it, the absurdity of it, or the futility of it, or the disappointment of it, or the necessity of it. So very rarely the sexiness of it. And most stories about sex, in any of its complicated manifestations, I don't really care for, I've finally decided. (Except Houellebecq — Houellebecq fascinates me.) Most reading is about getting inside other people's lives, other people's heads, but when it comes to sex...? Maybe because it's so intensely personal, maybe it's the one thing where you have to get inside your (my?) own head first. (And maybe I see Houellebecq trying to do this? Grapple with it inside his own head, I mean.)

Only one entry to my mind qualifies as erotic, and it was a pleasure to read, and that's Emmanuel Carrère's "This Is for You." It was first published in a literary supplement to Le Monde in 2002 (available online, in French), as an open letter to his girlfriend. Ah, the French! You'd never find a North American newspaper printing any such smutthing.

You can read more about this piece in terms of its tackling a taboo as well the performative function of language (about Carrère's comparing the power of a statement like, "You are getting wet," to the effect of, "I declare war." (I almost wish I was doing a Linguistics PhD thesis on sex talk)).