We must do eccentric things

A new edition of The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington, is out from NYRB Classics, featuring an afterword by Olga Tokarczuk. I'm delighted to discover what I assume to be that afterword printed as "Eccentricity as Feminism" in The Paris Review.

That is why the philosophy of eccentricity expressed in The Hearing Trumpet is connected with age. It can be treated as a special message from the old to the young, going against the current of time. We must do eccentric things. Where everyone is doing This, we must do That. While the whole center is noisily establishing its order, we shall remain on the periphery — we won’t let ourselves be drawn into the center, we shall ignore it and surpass it.

I previously got caught up on the winking nun, and Tokarczuk also devotes a great deal (but a different kind) of energy to understanding her. But I never got around to writing about the book once I'd finished reading it.

(I remember feeling bamboozled while searching for a cover image, as Goodreads showed me an edition clearly not my own and all the covers featured cats. Ah, my Make America Kittens Again browser extension was still enabled.)  

I'm still dipping into Carrington's short stories, and I have plans to write about the power of older women. Maybe I can justify buying this new version of a book I already have to reread it (already!) from a new perspective.

See also "Reclaiming women’s bodies from shame": a photographic illumination of ageing and "A different way of living": why writers are celebrating middle-age, because it's all connected (although while I concur that sexuality changes, I refuse to believe that a "quietly sex-free middle age" is the reward some of them make it out to be).

Oh my gawd, Viv Albertine, remember the Slits? I loved that song.

I water her every day

About this time last summer, my espresso machine clogged up. After several failed attempts to clean it, I gave up the double espresso filter basket for dead, and resorted to drinking singles. This week, out of the blue, as if I was waking from a stupor, it occurs to me that I might find a replacement basket online without having to replace the entire machine. Twenty-four hours and twelve dollars later, I resume double-espresso mornings. It's a productive and creative week, and also a happy week. I can't help but wonder if all my breakdowns and tirades, my crises of faith in myself and in others, my angers and resentments, and even the desperate explorations into myself — all my emotions — were simply the result of not enough coffee.

It turns out that my tomato plant is cherry tomatoes after all — pluck one, pop it in your mouth, and it's gone. I'd wanted something more substantial. After some initial disappointment, I find I am able to harvest a couple dozen at once after all. This balcony garden yields meagre offerings, though I am grateful for the herbs. I will plant more and better next year.

After 141 days of working from home, I return to the office to retrieve some personal effects. I had a scheduled entry time, with specific instructions about arriving with my own PPE, not arriving by public transportation. I walk the eight kilometres; I arrive early and wait. No one is there to verify my protective gear. No one is there to make me sign a waiver or to attest to being symptom free. No one is there except one of the porters, who looks mildly shell-shocked, like working in isolation has driven him slightly mad — the graveyard shift in broad daylight, with only the ghosts of employees to clean up after.

I recover two pairs of shoes from the cloakroom. I pick my Fluevogs out from amid several dozen sneakers, all neatly lined up expecting their owners to step into them at the start of every workday. The last time I went to the office I was still wearing winter boots.

There are no laptops on the desks, but there are monitors and wires, pens and notepads. Sweaters on the backs of chairs swiveled as if abandoned mid conversation. I am reminded of the pictures of Chernobyl schoolrooms, only this feels more invisible, less organic.

There is an uprooted plant on the floor of the cafeteria. The weeping tree in our studio looks as if it might crumble if I stroke its leaves — it's cried itself dry. Remarkably, my happy bean plant still looks happy — its arms are straining toward the window and it's thirsty, but I swear it twitched for joy as I approached, my every step sending tremors through the bones of the building.

I sit the bean in my bag atop the reference books I came for, padded out with my hoodie. I grab the office-issue headphones. I empty my drawer of instant soup packets and handcream — I may need those.

The rest of the day feels weirdly decadent: hanging out with my sister on her terrace, window shopping, lunching out at an open-air market. Is life normal again? How come I didn't get the memo? Ich will in die Zukunft reisen.

At home, one of the indoor plants continues to have the company of mushrooms. One sprouts and dies, another takes its place. 

Since lockdown, there are now four novels I have read that I have not (yet?) written about here. I continue to read essays by Didion and stories by Carrington ("A Man in Love"):

We went through a door at the back and reached a room where there was a bed in which lay a woman, motionless and probably dead. It seemed to me that she must have been there a long time, for the bed was overgrown with grass.

"I water her every day," the greengrocer said thoughtfully. "For forty years I've been quite unable to tell whether she is alive or dead. She hasn't moved or spoken or eaten during that time. But, and this is the strange thing, she remains warm."

We are overgrown — by masks and gloves and viral effluvia, by our metaphorical mushrooms — but somehow we remain warm.  

The texture of orchid petals and the colour of Limbo

I'm reading The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington, and for such a slim book it's slow going. It started off riotously funny and clever but then I was stopped cold by the winking nun.

While he spoke I was able to examine a large oil painting on the wall facing me. The painting represented a nun with a very strange and malicious face. [...] The face of the nun in the oil painting was so curiously lighted that she seemed to be winking, although that was hardly possible. She must have had one blind eye and the painter had rendered her infirmity realistically. However the idea that she was winking persisted, she was winking at me with a most disconcerting mixture of mockery and malevolence.

I thought, I need to pay careful attention, so for a few days I lived my life and danced my dance and read something "light" and "escapist" (though that book turned out to be neither really), until I thought I was ready to devote some energy to understanding what Carrington had laid before me.

And I read the words and I read more words and I flipped back the pages and I carried it with me, even while I skimmed other texts about eloquence and nonmainstream sexual practices and pearls.

The early pages of the novel put me in mind of The Crying of Lot 49 — the humour, the secret society, the sense of conspiracy and paranoia, and the reference to Remedios Varo.

Once Marian arrived at the institution, I couldn't get Yoko Tawada out of my head, these people with their strange manners, these surreal images.

Where I'm at, the text is a correspondence within a secret book within the book, folding in on itself. I love these buried-treasure texts — reading becomes an archeological dig, a trip down the rabbit hole.

I thought perhaps some research might enlighten me on this section of the book before I backtracked my way through it. Most summaries of the book gloss over this episode entirely, leading me to believe that it is insignificant. Some readers confess to finding it boring. I wondered briefly if anyone had actually read it, apart from the handful of academics who wrote their thesis on obscure subjects: Carrington's surrealist treatment of space and time, gothic aesthetics in Carrington's surrealist use of myth, that surrealist women could be both muse and creator, something about gender and the divine.

Internet searches for the winking nun eventually led me to René Magritte. In the May 1933 issue of Le Surréalisme au service de révolution there appeared a drawing by René Magritte of a sexually transgressive nun, entitled Vierge retroussée (Trussed-up Virgin)

Winking beneath a halo, the robes of this "virgin" are pushed back to expose a pair of gartered black stockings and a provocative pair of pumps, indexing both her sexual transgressiveness generally and her residence within a homoerotically charged convent environment more specifically.

While my searches began to procure more and more references to his drawing, it was days before I managed to track down the image itself.

In the meantime I learned that "winking nun" might be a veiled reference to a vulva. Certainly Magritte's nun's draped robes have a certain vulvular aura about them, topped by a hooded clitoral winkle.

Carrington's nun is not obviously sexualized, at least, not on the surface. In fact, Marian surmises she has some physical affliction that contorts her face.

Confined to a patriarchal institution and not bound by societal norms, what could she possibly be winking about?

"It might be the Zurbarán school," she said, looking uncommonly thoughtful. "Probably painted in the late eighteenth century. Spanish of course, an Italian could never have done anything so enchantingly sinister. A nun with a leer. Unknown master."

"Do you suppose she is really winking, or is she blind in one eye?" I asked, anxious for Georgina's opinion on a more personal aspect of the lady.

"She is definitely winking; the bawdy old bag is probably peeking at the monastery through a hole in the wall, watching the monks prancing around in their knickers." Georgiana had a one-track mind. ""It is beautiful," she added. "I wonder the Gams let it hand amongst their hideous possessions. Everything in the house ought to have been burnt long ago apart from the leering abbess."

Certainly the painting had a force all of its own.

[...]

"Yes," said Georgina, "how those Spaniards understood the painting of black drapery. So much more superbly blackly depressing than anyone else's black. The old Lady's habit had the texture of orchid petals and the colour of Limbo. It really is a wonderful painting. Her face surrounded by that white starched frill is as luminous as the full moon, and just as bewitching." Somehow I felt that Georgina understood the painting of the leering abbess better than I ever could.

I think my obsession with the winking nun is enhanced this week by my having attained some tangential psychological epiphany in a highly sexualized context. I'm learning how to be in my body and outside of my body at the same time. This is one of the magic tricks of great sex, but it's also a lesson learned from aging. I think Carrington knew it.

As for the abbess's tractate, it tells of falling into ecstasies and a witchcraft of salves; sexual acrobatics, cross-dressing, and a sinful ointment. Nocturnal restlessness, inner turbulence. Ultimately the abbess's body is bloated with death and bursts, giving birth to an angel.

As yet I can find no lay explanation of this history, but if I understand the summaries, it sets off something like a grail quest. Perhaps the body is the vessel.