Cracking up the concrete like claws

I was reading in the metro this morning and I read a sentence that reminded me of another sentence. I made a mental note of the sentence and read on. Something made me want to check the author’s resources — I’d noticed that she includes research notes at the end of the book. That something — I don’t recall now what is was — was possibly not fictitious, but a reference to something (a book, a movie) in our nonfictitious lived reality.

The sentence was this:

From the Third Hotel, the closest CADECA was on La Rampa, on a street corner shaded by a banana tree, the roots cracking up the concrete like claws.

And the sentence it reminded me of was this:

It's just one of those pieces of Rome that cracks through the concrete of the present day like a bad memory, a way in for grass, for all kinds of untidy thoughts.

And it made me think of the difference between a horror story and a love story, and it made me think that maybe they're the same thing.

I am reading The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg, which put me in mind of one little sentence from Break.up by Joanna Walsh, whose Hotel was listed in the notes. Coincidence, of course, like the coincidence of all horror stories.

There's this thing about how horror springs up when someone's compass is taken away, leaving them unable to navigate the world. Rural horror tends to rely on some literal abyss or dislocation from "reality"; whereas urban horror relies on a different kind of gap in our reality — abandoned lots, alleyways, cracks in sidewalks.

The Third Hotel and Break.up are indeed very similar, women traversing an urban landscape, tracing a lost love, following their footsteps, repeating their words. So they are both horror stories. (The horror of a break-up?) How are they different?

[Possibly I should spend more time writing about books while I'm reading them instead of waiting till I'm done.]

Once you agree it's love, something about it is over

Love stories are a confessional whispered to a third party, not the lover, because once you agree it's love, something about it is over.

This is not a love story. It's a story about a love story.

When I read a review of Break.up, by Joanna Walsh, early last summer, I thought it might help me process a difficult breakup of my own. I ran right out to buy it, but for some reason delayed reading it. I was feeling a sense of urgency, both regarding getting over this guy, R, but also about writing about that experience and my various epiphanies, but I think I wanted my closure to be pure, uncoloured by this kind of autofiction.

I left Break.up lying on my coffee table all summer. Sometimes it would admonish me to just get on with it, get on with all of it... the writing, the living, the loving.

When months later I finally got around to reading it, I was processing an entirely different lovelife state. What I hadn't known when I acquired Break.up was that I was then exchanging the initial text messages with M, what is no doubt my strangest (and still ongoing) "relationship" to date. Months on I was struggling to pin it down, I wanted to fold it up and put it in a box, tuck it away. For my own good, really. But I let it flutter on, too impalpable to be described.

R was my spring, long gone before I started reading Break.up, and quite unexpectedly, and just as I turned the final pages, he appears to be back in my life.

O was my autumn, a potential romantic interest, then an occasional lover, then a friend. But Break.up cast light on that relationship too. And as I turned the final pages, the friendship cracked.

But it was the summer (the year?) of M. I've never met M in real life. Sometimes I wonder whether he really exists as he's presented himself — maybe he lives in a basement around the corner from me, maybe he's someone I already know. Does it even matter if he exists as anything at all outside my own head?

Your tongue in my mouth: did we speak truer when we spoke online, without bodies, sounding tinkling with the tongues of angels?

The men who counted last year amount to a trinity, my trinity of men — my R, O, and M — my read-only memory.

I met them all online.

And this is the point of Break.up: the strange state of text-based relationships.

I had 13 face-to-face encounters with R. Fewer than that with O. None at all with M. Yet the messages we exchanged number many thousand.

But I don't like phone-talk: so breathily intimate, my ear up against someone's mouth, the crackly physical proximity of my parents' era. I remember everything you said out loud. It's my own words I didn't hear. When I talked they echoed round my skull, or down the line, but didn't stick. As I pushed them out I couldn't hear myself speak. I wonder what I said to you. Type, at least, had memory. Give me the cold keys of my aluminum laptop and I'll play them like a Belleville piano. What's more, writing gives me time for some elegance of response, (elegance is refusal), for some esprit d'éscalier, in the timelapse. An object qui parle, naturally there were things I held back. [sic]

I think of myself as a text-based person — and here I mean literary text as opposed to phone text. I think I'm better "on paper." I like to think about my words before I commit them to paper, before I commit to them, before I commit them. I have never written so much as I did in 2018, drafts of stories and character sketches, poetic outpourings, notes to boys. And never have words been so inadequate.

She considers the rules of the game: the correspondence takes turns. Is it my turn to respond? How long can I take to respond? The gap between messages widens. What if you don't respond?

Now each word has more edges, and they are sharp: your works are more defined now because, though you still write to me, there are fewer of them, and they come less often. All those words we used to have, and now we're monosyllabic! Each stands out, sparser therefore more distinct, changing the focus, making it difficult to judge how far away you are from me.

Walsh travels across Europe for the length of this text.

It's just one of those pieces of Rome that cracks through the concrete of the present day like a bad memory, a way in for grass, for all kinds of untidy thoughts.

When R and I broke up, I walked back and forth across my city, saw the ghosts of us everywhere, back and forth.

Walsh writes things that are eerily similar to lines among my own post-break-up scribblings last spring. Walsh writes: "You, for instance, are not here now, and you-not-being-here accompanies me wherever I go." "Love's not analog, it's digital." (Although, I argued the opposite.) "What I miss is desire."

As I mentioned previously, I didn't entirely connect with this book. The syntax is precious, surely the result of writer's workshops.

Despite the subject, it's emotionally distant, almost alienatingly so. It's too personal to be a universal experience for a reader to automatically embody.

But I love the fragmented nature of this book, travelling from place, to memory, to place. I love the quotes scattered throughout: Breton, Heidegger, Barthes, etc. (I saw a girl reading Nadja on the metro, I wanted to hug her.)

It's important that there's very little about him in this text at all. It's not about him, not really.

In the last year I've read everything I could find about love. What did these books tell me? All about what it is to be a lover, next to nothing about the beloved, in any case, nothing that matched your own specific oddness, or maybe I mean my own. But I have found that writing is not a tool that can be turned upon anything: I have not chosen what to write about, I have only decided whether to write about what I have. Writing is not transferrable, perhaps.

I too have been doing research, reading everything I could find about love, I read this book about love. I've learned nothing.

It's about a year ago that I read Elif Batuman's The Idiot. It's shortly thereafter that I started online dating, and the mood of that book lingered, coloured my experience.

Here's what I've learned in the past year, from real life and from the books:

1. Relationships happen inside one person's head, they are forged and broken there.
2. Love does not exist between two people, love is one person's attitude to the world (and with any luck, it coincides with that of another).
3. Words are inadequate, no matter which words, no matter how many.

Reviews
In the Guardian, Break.up by Joanna Walsh review – the end of a virtual affair:

What I feel in the end is admiration without pleasure. Walsh places feelings on display, yet keeps them austerely inaccessible, and I see the point of this without enjoying the effect.

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Fighting for Emotional Liberty in Joanna Walsh’s “Break.up”:

Break.up is as much about the loss of emotional liberty in a world that relies more and more on digital connection as it is about the loss of love.

The possibility of a way of being

Here in the Piazza della Rotonda, like everywhere else, it's the older women I see first. I think I'm searching in them for a sign of what I might become. I was doing this aged fifteen and I haven't found it yet. The older women on the streets don't look like the thin, tan women on the billboards I saw from the train, or like the solid, white women who have held up Roman porticos for so many years without a sigh. Because they are not answered in the architecture I know that the women walking through the square are not real women — or maybe they are real women, but the fake women on the statues and the billboards are more important. In any case I look at them slyly, knowing there's something shameful in my looking. I'm trying to catch something I recognize — the girl in the woman, how she got there, her story — but I'm also looking for something more, the possibility of a way of being. Maybe I'll only recognize it when it's my turn.

— from Break.up, by Joanna Walsh.

Am I real or not real? Less important or more important? Am I sly? Shameful? What is it I recognize? Is it my turn? What am I becoming?

Homeless rifle dumpsters

"Homeless rifle dumpsters..."

How do you parse that?

Homeless can be an adjective or a noun. Rifle can be a noun or a verb. Dumpsters is a plural noun (like hipsters), but when preceded by nouns one might be tricked into believing the -s suffix signifies a verb in the third-person present tense.

But here's the full sentence:

"Homeless rifle dumpsters but so slowly, so leisurely, that poverty might be a pastime."

It's from Break-up, by Joanna Walsh, which disappoints me in exactly the way Sludge Utopia didn't. (Expectations.)

It's so fucking writerly. (Pretentious.)

Is it beautiful? Maybe. I'm just past the novel's half-way mark, and I find the prose almost unbearable. (Thematically, however, the novel is compelling. Required reading in the context of my year of love and loss.)

Subject, collective noun = "homeless." Typically an adjective, it's been nouned by abbreviating "homeless people." No article. (You couldn't substitute just any collective noun and achieve the same effect.)

Verb = "rifle." In the greater context — an urban post-Soviet landscape — the noun may be more expected.

But my brain doesn't yet categorize these words as subject and verb. My brain is still exploring the potential of the adjective-noun reading and wondering what qualifies as a "homeless rifle," until it realizes that "dumpsters" can't function as a verb. Try "rifle dumpsters" (dumpsters reserved exclusively for rifles?) that are homeless only to be left hanging verbless. Start over.

My psycholinguistic faculties take many milliseconds to understand that homeless people are rifling through dumpsters.

It may be beautiful, but it's unnecessarily demanding. The payoff isn't worth the effort. It's the kind of sentence I might have aspired to write myself some 20 years ago, for its gymnastic economy. Today when I read it I roll my eyes and scribble profanities in the margin.

Break.up in my head sounds like it was written to be the sort of thing writers read at readings, as performance, all pompous and breathy, even though it could be more satisfyingly and meaningfully read in an easy, natural manner. I wish I could find another tone in which to read Break.up; nothing about it sounds real. (Is literature performance?)