Détente

Not quite 3 weeks into kindergarten, and I hear what's sure to become a familiar drone for years to come. "I'm tired. I don't want to go to school today."

We make some final wardrobe adjustments, and Helena's attitude relaxes a little before she puts on another.

But they'll probably have a détente she tells me, as she stretches out on her rumpled bed, assuming a pose of repose.

"Une détente! C'est plus cool qu'une sieste."

Oh, really? Why's that?

She raises a cocky little eyebrow. "Mais, oui! C'est pas la garderie; I'm in school now."

Something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful

Or maybe that even the mere possibility of expressing any of this childish heartbreak to someone else seemed impossible except in the context of the mystery of true marriage, meaning not just a ceremony and financial merger but a true communion of souls, and Schmidt now lately felt he was coming to understand why the Church all through his childhood catechism and pre-Con referred to it as the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, for it seemed every bit as miraculous and transrational and remote from the possibilities of actual lived life as the crucifixion and resurrection and transubstantiation did, which is to say it appeared not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as a kind of navigational star, as in in the sky, something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful in the sort of distant way that reminded you always of how ordinary and unbeautiful and incapable of miracles you your own self were, which was another reason why Schmidt had stopped looking at the sky or going out at night or even usually ever opening the lightproof curtains of his condominium's picture window when he got home at night [...]

— from "Mister Squishy," in Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace.

So. I managed only to read a mere fraction of that brick he wrote, kind of hating it while admiring it, resenting it for not quite getting it, but had (still have) every intention of reading the whole damn thing before the year is out, chalking up my relationship with that book as a matter of wrong time, wrong place, and choosing to reserve judgement for after a better time and place could be had with it, and it sits uncomfortably with me to pay attention to the man's work just because he's gone and died, but I loved (loved!) that commencement address of his, and I pressed it upon tens of people who didn't know who the hell he was (and most of them were in agreement with me in finding it a pretty beautiful thing), and that lobster essay was pretty interesting too, so I found it unsettling but serendipitous that on my lunch break yesterday, on a quick jaunt over to the bookstore across the street, I should find Oblivion in the bargain stacks, so I bought it, even while I wanted to chastise the checkout clerk (on whose face there was no sign of recognition of the book, or the author's name, no sign that the material substance of our transaction had registered in any way other than that of the electronic scanning of barcode and resulting financial exchange), or the management, that this was somehow wrong, wanted to wake them up, "Don't you know he just killed himself? And you put him in the bargain stacks?" just as similarly, but different, when I found Doris Lessing on that same table I wondered, "Don't you know she was just awarded the Nobel prize?" but hey, the guy's dead, and the book was cheap, why not read it now? I managed to read a story (at random, from the middle) while waiting in line and found it, well, devastating.

From A to Z

"I spy, with my little eye, something that starts with the letter A," Helena challenges me while we lunch.

None of the usual possibilities are in evidence. She's been trying new things lately, but I draw a blank.

Finally I ask an all-important question: "Starts with A... In English or in French?"

"English. En français, ça commence avec Z." She's quite clear on this. English, A; français, Z.

I need a hint. "Everybody has two of them." Arms? No. "They can be blue, or green, or..." I throw out random silly answers: feet, parents, eyes, cars.

She smiles as if I've hit on something. "A-, aaa-, a-, eyes." Oh.

But the French doesn't fit? "Z-, zzz-, z-, zyeux. Lay zyeux. Les yeux."

It's clear we have a way to go in our spelling skills. In both languages.

The nameless human doom

[O]ne lacks the innocence to be with Nature; her influence, her quiet insistent presence, is outweighed from the start by one's awareness of the nameless human doom that is grinding on day and night, unstoppably.

— Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé, September 9, 1914, from Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters.

How quickly it turns

I'd been in an unreasonably good mood as the week started, but very suddenly it turned.

1. I think I may have killed Slimey. Too much water. I cleaned out his jar, leaving him there to dry out, but when I told J-F I thought he might be dead, J-F at once removed the jar from the house. I think now I'm more upset at the prospect of not knowing whether he lives or dies than by his potential death in itself. I was holding out hope that Slimey would right himself — surely he's simply tired from having gone to school with Helena.

(It turns out, J-F had upturned the jar's contents (Slimey) into an outdoor potted plant. Hours later I saw Slimey fully extended, eyeball stalks atwitch, and plotting an escape route.)

2. I've been anticipating review copies of a couple books this week and still I haven't received them. Grr.

3. I did not manage to attend the cello Master's Recital yesterday evening as I'd planned. I've been thinking of it for weeks, but felt guilty and selfish for already having spent an evening out early in the week and with another commitment another day soon, and resentful that I must cook supper and bathe the child and see said child to bed and spend time at home. This, entirely irrational. Of course, I could've gone, and we fought, and suddenly it was easy to go, there was time for this, for that, and for me too, and I almost went, but in the end I chose not to. There will be more recitals in weeks to come, and I will plan better.

It's taken very little to set things right again.

1. I drop Helena off at school in the morning. I've developed an interest in befriending one of the other mothers — this based solely on the fact that she wears exquisite shoes.

2. Helena is thrilled to find that her playmate from the park attends the same school. She has a little crush on Lazaro. (One recent evening she confided her worry in me, that they wouldn't be able to talk to each other — we'd heard him speak Spanish with his mother. We confirmed that he spoke French and found out his name on a subsequent park visit.)

3. I've started learning tai chi. It makes my fingers hurt. I don't think this is normal, but I like to think this is what it must feel like when negative energy leaves my body.

In which the highlights of my fabulous weekend with the kid are itemized

Friday night
1. Suggested the kid have ice cream for supper. It was hot. (She opted for something more sensible. Popsicles for dessert though.)

2. Swung on a swing at the park.

3. Pierogi for supper! (How selfish I am!: I hide them in the freezer till he's away for the weekend so I don't have to share.)

Saturday
4. Made crêpes. With the kid. Lots of them. (Lots of crêpes, just the one kid.) We will have no breakfast worries for weeks to come!

5. Ate crêpes. (Not all of them.)

6. Fed the ducks at the park. (The other park — took the métro.) Instigated some kind of duck riot.

7. Got caught in the rain. Got soaked. Jumped in puddle.

8. Had a big glass of buttermilk. (The kid is not so much into this, but I think it's delicious.)

Sunday
9. Stayed in our pyjamas all day long.

10. Played board games.

11. Made significant headway in the book I'm reading — have been reading all summer (Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters).

12. Found massive snail in the soil of a recently acquired houseplant in the course of tending to it. Presumed it dead, but was mistaken. Spent hours, off and on, watching said snail slime about a water glass, extend and retract. Set about to construct it a proper home: old jar nested with dirt and leaves. (Has anyone ever kept a snail for a pet? Tips?)

13. Watched some favourite Doctor Who episodes. Helena has seen them numerous times, but she asks more sophisticated questions about them now.

14. Wrote, some.

15. Did I mention? Stayed in our pyjamas all day long.

This is love too

There's something joyous about Adverbs, by Daniel Handler. It's not the what; it's the how. It's executed playfully and brashly, if sometimes wistfully.

I'm not sure what qualifies it as a novel, why it proclaims itself to be one. It reads like a series of interconnected short stories, with some characters recurring and some incidents in common.

But it's all about love.

Each of the stories takes for its title an adverb — briefly, symbolically, particularly — the manner of love explored within it.

I am trying to figure out the difference between this book and the other collection of short stories I recently read. The stories in One More Year (Sana Krasikov) were also about love, various kinds, but all imbued with loneliness and desperation. Adverbs, on the other hand, while it doesn't shy away from the odd or hopeless, glories in all love's messiness. These 2 books — only the words are different.

Am I in a better mood this week? I have been busier and am more tired. Does this make me more or less in the world? Does that put me more fully, better, into the experience of reading? The joy — does it come from me or the book?

Here's a question Handler poses that I'm stuck on: When do you know when something is becoming something that changes you? That would be pretty much everything, all the time, if you're open to it.

When do you learn that the world, like any diner worth its salt, is open twenty-four hours a day?

Because it is, you know. I learned this some time ago, but it's important to be reminded.

(Summer was open 24 hours a day, and it changed me!)

I've been reading this book mostly in the metro, a diversion from the general misery of the commute(rs).

They abandon the clearing for the rest of the story to walk together. This is how it is in life and love. In life and love we are with people for a while, and then we join other people, people we have not met, and we walk with them, and we leave behind all the things where we used to be. Sometimes we leave people behind too. Sometimes we walk away from the forest and abandon a person there and never see them again. This happens every day. Every day this happens and scarcely anybody cares.

Handler tells us on virtually every page what love is, how this is part of it, and this too, and this thing also is a kind of love, and he's right, really, everything — all of it — is love.

It's weird and sad, but this is life. Grab it by the balls. Be in it. Love!

Stupidly. Fiercely. Better.

The transparent storyboard

Wired pulls back the curtain on creating a feature (and on Charlie Kaufman, it so happens), blogging the entire process: Storyboard.

The few posts to date are background on the concept and logistics, but it promises to catch up to real time any day now and lay bare the rough drafts, internal emails, production hiccups...

The editor in me thinks this is one of the very coolest concept blogs ever!

(Via Boing Boing.)

Devour your desperation

And he traveled, from one side to the other
of dreams,
just like an earthworm,
dragging his desperation,
devouring it.

— from "The Worm," in Romantic Dogs, by Roberto Bolaño.

(Coming soon.)

Girlfriend

I started writing this post about a year ago. Mostly, it was about Helena coming into her own as a person, being her own little girl, and about some of the resulting turmoil I'd been experiencing as her mother.

In a year, little has changed — she's still coming into her own as a person (does it ever stop?), and I still feel turmoil about it — and everything has changed.

I don't write about her here as much as I'd like. I say this is because I think she deserves her privacy, but this is also a convenient excuse. The truth is it's hard to write about her: Mind you, I feel that I don't write about her per se; I write about the experience of motherhood (which happens to pertain to her). (Just as, generally, I don't write about books; I write about how they affect me.) And that is extremely personal, which makes it difficult to articulate — to myself, let alone others.

So. This post I started writing a year ago... much of it existed only in my head; what few words I'd written, I've essentially deleted. So, why do I even bother to revisit it now? Because I think my daughter is amazingly cool, and I want to remember, now and for always.

What I wanted to say then...

Helena bought her first CD. I don't know how it came about, but Helena loves Avril Lavigne. (Loved? This phase may already be over...) I think particularly the pink in her hair. After seeing repeated promos for a concert to be broadcast on TV last summer, we had to watch. Weeks went by, and Helena kept singing her songs and asking for a CD. Maybe I'm wrong, but Avril to me embodies a better kind of girl power than do many of her contemporaries — besides which she's musically more my style. So it came to pass.

(Do you remember the first record you bought? How old were you? I was 12, and ashamed to say that first album was Asia.)

I bought Helena a Barbie. A year later this seems like no news at all. I'd never been much of a Barbie girl myself, and generally I feel as conflicted about Barbie corporation as I do about Disney, even while this brand name consumption is de rigueur among her peers. Helena wanted a Barbie — begged for one. I thought long and hard. Ultimately, I thought, better to head off the influences of others I may not approve of and introduce her to the world of Barbie myself. I'm proud that, with just the tiniest bit of nudging, she turned away from all the sparkly sluttiness and chose for herself something altogether more wholesome, Barbie in jeans and with a pony, seeming to me the right formula for realistic fantasy play. Helena has of course received more Barbies since, but I'm glad the first one came from me.

Then there was Julie, a new educatrice at the daycare. Helena was enamored of her. "You know, Mom, I love Julie more than you. She smells sssoooo good." I haven't heard of Julie in months; she hadn't worked there long. Funny about smell, though — so primal and Proustian, smell; I was jealous of Julie. But most days when I tuck Helena in, she tells me I smell good, and my heart soars.

(My mother wore perfume, still wears it, and it triggers a migraine. When I'm around, I've asked her not to. But still she does. She puts so little, she says. But I still have to breathe away from her, can't breathe her in. She had a scarf, however, that smelled like her, like her beneath the cologne, and some years ago I asked to have it. Even after repeated washings, I smell her in it, faint, but there, around my neck.)

What I want to say now...

Helena asks to have her radio on when I tuck her in. We went through a phase of this, a year ago, and sometime before that, and she'd listen to classical music to fall asleep. Now she asks to change the station and settles on "classic rock," so she's falling asleep to 54-40, Led Zeppelin, and U2. I check in on her the other night; she's still awake, and I ask if I should turn the radio off. "No. I'm not dancing, Mom. I'm listening to it quietly, like this. I like listening to music, especially cool music. Rock and roll is cool." And then she plays a couple bars of air guitar along to Heart.

Last week she was singing Foo Fighters in the bathtub.

Helena started school last week. Kindergarten.

Look at me
Look at me
Just called to say that it's good to be
ALIVE
In such a small world...

Day 2 her father dropped her off. When her teacher came out to corral the kids, Helena simply turned around and said, "Bye, Dad."

*****

"You're my best friend, Momma. We'll always be best friends, won't we, Momma?" For a little while longer, at least.

Submerged in that flood tide of raw, dense, motley, and tumultuous life

Her mother was a shopkeeper who had an open-air stall selling Catalan notions and textiles in the market plaza. The market plaza: a great quadrangular space, bounded by decrepit and tumbledown old houses with porticoes, which in the morning hours filled with the village throngs in a vast bubbling of colors, smells, and noises of the most violent and blatant kind; all manner of carmines, vermilions, veronese greens, and yellows of the fruits and vegetables; scarlets, cadmiums, indigos, and purples of the peasant skirts, capes, and parasols; the balsamic aroma of the mountain grasses, the cloying odor of the pimento, afuegaelpito and pata de mulo cheeses, scent of damp earth, stink of corral and stable; cock crows, duck quacks, lamb bleats, mongrel barks; sound of hurdy-gurdy and of bagpipes, laughs, agreements and curses, the barber's oratory, and psalmody of the little storyteller, the grumbling of the blind man, reciter of tales of crimes and shipwrecks. In the early afternoon, the plaza faded out and fell into a pallid and deep quietude, without any sign of life. In the still air there wafted the bell of the neighboring church of San Isidoro, pealing Animas.

There Micaela spent the years of her infancy, adolescence, and youth. Her education might have been even worse than that of the streets, as is the education of the market, were it not that Micaela had not been born to allow herself to be shaped by the surrounding reality or to be carried along by the flux of life, but rather to correct and channel the reality at hand and the flow of life that had fallen to her lot, within herself and about herself. Primordial character trait: the absence of sensuality. Her senses did not dominate her. She almost, almost, did not have senses, since she did not use them to surrender herself to the world or to delight in its beautiful spectacle, but as spies and witnesses for the prosecution, which brought news and information from outside to the internal tribunal of her intelligence, which almost always handed down condemnatory judgments. In the center of the market, submerged in that flood tide of raw, dense, motley, and tumultuous life, Micaela sat abstracted from the sensations at hand; the colors did not dazzle her, not the smells stimulate her, not the music soften her. Her skin was lemon colored and as if cured, nerveless — an insulator — skin, on the other hand, matte, firm, knitted, and very beautiful. And, not judging with her senses but with her mind, the market, which was the sunlit sky of her world, seemed to her like a shapeless and repugnant jumble of greed, lust, ignorance, deceit, hatred, and misery. And the nighttime sky, the evening and empty plaza, like an unending tedium, a premonition of death.

— from Honeymoon, Bittermoon, by Ramón Pérez de Ayala.

Micaela early realizes that men are digusting pigs, and when she has a son she decides to raise him to be the man she would be. So Urbano's youth is sheltered and his education censored. Micaela thinks this a success, until Urbano's wedding night, when it becomes clear that the newlyweds are lacking in some essential information.

The children are "pure" but the adults are hypocrites; all of them are fools.

I picked up this book years ago for a couple bucks, but not till the other day did I grab it on my way out of the house. I'm about halfway through, and it's very funny, while still touching, wise, and poetic.

One more

One More Year, by Sana Krasikov, is a collection of 8 short stories covering the contemporary immigrant experience of Eastern Europeans. (But they're not even a little bit like Bezmozgis, if you're wondering, if that's all you know about Eastern European immigrant stories; he's much funnier. Yet I mention it.)

The stories are all rather depressing, with themes of dislocation, of disconnectedness between people's hopes and their reality. Krasikov says they're love stories, and they are, but of a tragic kind, more about loneliness, a yearning for a proper love story.

Every review I come across offers up a different favourite story, which is the nice thing about a collection, and about reading people's opinions on them — to see how the different expressions of these themes relate to varied readers.

I'm not a big fan of short stories in general, and I'm not entirely sure why, but they can — and these do — offer poignant and sharp observations. The last story, the longest of the lot, was dissatisfying only in that the cast of characters was so interesting, I'd've liked to know them in novel length.

Review: "Most of the women in these stories are lonely and needy and allow themselves to be betrayed and neglected by men they cling to because they fear being alone."

Article.
Discussion.
Interview.

Stories available online
"Companion" — my favourite, and winner of an O Henry Award.
"The Repatriates."

Excerpts
"Maia in Yonkers."
"Debt."
"There Will Be No Fourth Rome."

It's Austerrific! Kind of.

If anyone cares and doesn't already know, Paul Auster has a new book out: Man in the Dark.

I care a little bit, but the truth is, I've fallen out of love with Paul Auster. I'm not really sure how it happened, and it surprises me more than anyone, but there you go.

This morning I listened to an interview on NPR, and then I listened to the much more interesting conversation on The Bat Segundo Show.

I'll get aorund to reading this book someday, but I'm in no hurry.

Coincidentally, I just this week read Travels in the Scriptorium. It was a quick and engaging enough read, but dissatisfying. I can't really see someone not already familiar with the bulk of Auster's novel getting much out of this one. And those who do have that familiarity would prefer something new, or something more.

You can find Paul Auster news here.

Clouds

I've spent a lot of time this summer looking up, with my head in the clouds some might say.

We play the cloud game on long drives. Mostly, they just look like clouds to me. Fake clouds. If you saw them in a painting you would laugh, decry them as phoney.

We turn the bend and suddenly there a dolphin frolics in the sky between the trees. Around the next bend, swathed in robes a Bedouin spurs on his camel. Then hordes of Mongols wielding cutlasses storm across the sky.

These fascinating clouds. By turns dark portents, angelic snows, childish whimsy, cotton-candy circus safety nets, demonic phantasmagoria, hellfires in white.

So I wonder, from a painterly perspective, how can you represent them credibly?

What I did on my summer vacation? I spent untold hours trying to pin a cloud to paper.

This is my cloud:



This photo is dark and doesn't do it justice, doesn't capture the light, the texture, the thickness, the slabs of colour. (Oil pastel crayons were always my medium of choice.) (Note: I have no formal art training whatsoever.) What you can't see is that this is layers of white and yellow and white and white and blue and white and grey and white and more white, on a 9 × 12 sheet of drawing paper.

(Perhaps I will get around to scanning the picture, to see if it shows depth.)

It's a cloud that looks like a cloud, because to draw a cloud that looks like a stampeding elephant would invite ridicule. I will save that for a future endeavour.

Poète impeccable, parfait magicien

Who in hell is Théophile Gautier?

"Posterity will judge Gautier to be one of the masters of writing, not only in France but also in Europe," attested Charles Baudelaire. So how come I've never heard of him?

Then one day not so long ago, his name crops up three times over the space of a few hours.

1. I've been wandering through Baudelaire this summer. I find that he dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to Gautier and that he regarded him as a great influence.

2. I pick up some brochures for the upcoming orchestral season, to bookmark those events that might be of interest to me. I notice that Les Nuits d'été are Gautier's love poems set to music by Berlioz. (Perhaps I will go.)

3. I receive an email informing me that NYRB Classics is releasing Gautier's My Fantoms.

The review copy I requested showed up shortly thereafter.

[In another instance of serendipity, while catching up on my blog reading I find that Imani has encountered Gautier: the lyrics, with music, and about the cycle.]

My Fantoms is a collection of 7 stories spanning Gautier's career. They are supernatural in their subject matter and vaguely erotic in their telling.

My favourite of the lot, from which I offer two excerpts, is "The Painter," for how it renders the artist's disposition, the artistic experience.

But as well as this, Onuphrius was a poet. There was no way in which he could ever escape his self-knowledge, and what contributed more than a little to his continual state of acute nervous excitement, which even Jacintha could not always control, was his obsessional reading. He read nothing but tales of legendary marvels, ancient chivalric romances, mystical poetry, treatises of the Cabal, German ballads, and volumes on demonology and witchcraft. In the midst of the bustling world of reality around him, he created from these books an inner world of visionary and ecstatic experience, which it was given to very few others to penetrate. From his ingrained habit of seeking the supernatural aspect, he had the ability to make the most ordinary, down to earth circumstance give rise to something weird and fantastic. You could have put him into a square, white-washed room, blank from floor to ceiling and with windows of opaque glass, and he would have been able to spot some uncanny apparition quite as easily as if he had been in a Rembrandt interior, flickering with uncertain light and awash with sinister shadows; such was the power of his mental vision acting on his physical eyesight to distort the straightest line and complicate the simplest object, like those curved or multi-faced mirrors which falsify everything placed in front of them, transforming them into grotesque or terrible presences.

The prose is dense in description, verging on florid, but real, and aspiring to surreal. There is poetry in every detail, a lust for life as Gautier's characters brush up against death.

Later in this story, the devil slices off the top of his skull:

This unexpected lobotomy did not seem to do him the least harm, expect that after a few minutes he heard a peculiar kind of buzzing above his head, and looking up he saw that all of his thoughts, no longer contained by the top of his skull, were pouring out in a chaotic stream like budgerigars fluttering from an open bird-cage door. All the ideal women that he had ever imagined to himself soared out of his head with their individual dresses, mannerisms, and modes of speech (though it ought to be said, in Onuphrius's defence, that they all looked like Jacintha's twin-sister); with them went the heroines of all the novels he had ever planned to write. Each of these women drew after them a cortège of lovers, some wearing heraldic tunics of the Middle Ages and others the top-hats and suits of eighteen thirty-two. After these came all the majestic, farcical, or monstrous human types he had ever dreamt up; then all his sketches for future paintings, set in every historical period and geographical location; then all his philosophical ideas, floating in the form of soap-bubbles; and finally, everything he remembered from his years of adolescent reading. All these continued to stream out into the air for well over an hour, until the whole studio was full, and the men and women walked up and down the room without the least hint of embarrassment, chatting, laughing, and arguing together and obviously feeling quite at home. Dumb-struck, Onuphrius could not think what to do with himself, and finally decided the best thing was simply to leave them at it, and go out of the studio.

The collection as a whole reminds me a great deal of Alexandre Dumas's Les Mille et un fantômes, or what I know of it. I'm delighted to learn that Dumas and Gautier travelled in the same circles — namely Le Petit Cénacle, a group of artists known for its extravagance and eccentricity — and I like to imagine they told each other ghost stories late into the night.

Théophile Gautier: Impeccable? Perfect? I don't know. But entertaining, sensuous, witty — yes. The man knows how to turn a phrase.

In which I rationalize my questionable parenting stance of allowing the 5-year-old to play GTA

I have mixed feelings about it. Truthfully, I hated the idea at first. But this battle I lost early on, and I never found ground to retake.

There are moments I cringe, like when the character wanders through a strip club; none of the nudity or behaviour seems to register with Helena, though — at least, it doesn't faze her — so I've restrained myself from reacting in case I create an issue where there isn't one.

I'm relaxing about it a bit. Evidence shows that she's a pretty good kid, and the game may be a means to, or at least an expression of, some positive ends.

1. She stops at all the red lights.
2. When riding a motorcycle, she always puts on a helmet.
3. She's a better driver than I am.
4. She prefers riding public transit over stealing cars.
5. She follows mission instructions to the best of her ability and as promptly as possible, without being sidetracked.
6. When she's lost, she stops and asks (her father) for directions.
7. She finds, and explores, every ladder, staircase, secret passageway, helipad, etc imaginable, and then some.
8. She spends her money on cab fare and on tasteful wardrobe improvements.
9. She lets herself be arrested by the police — they're only doing their job, she says, and it's because she did something wrong.
10. She spends "quality" time with her father.

Some things I rationalize. Some days I wish I were stronger.

Hébert's secrets

In the introduction to my collection of Anne Hébert's later novels, Mavis Gallant writes:

The French author Marguerie Yourcenar believed it was impossible to write anything about women, because their lives were so full of secrets. A woman's life, she said, was like one of those old-fashioned sewing machines with a multitude of small drawers meant to hold thread and buttons and miniature scissors. Every drawer contains a different secret. Yourcenar said nothing about men and secrets or about artists in general or writer in particular of the profound split between life imagined and lives lived.

This seemed to me an odd way to introduce this book, until it dawned on me that Gallant did not mean to comment on or critique Hébert's characters; rather she was relating what she knew of the character of Hébert herself. Indeed, there is a dearth of information about Hébert on the internets, even while she is one of Canada's, and Quebec's in particular, most acclaimed writers.

I persist in wondering how this idea of secrets might apply to Hébert's characters. Broadly, her female characters fall into two categories: domesticated and wild. Occasionally sliding along the spectrum. These women may be complicated, but they seem to me ultimately knowable. I wonder if this is a talent of Hébert's that she writes them this way, or the virtue of being a woman that allows me to read them this way.

The men (or boys), on the other hand, primarily driven by these women, for good or ill, remain unfathomably opaque to me. There must be more to their motivation than women (whether as objects of desire, forces to escape, mothers or wives)? Is this a weakness in Hébert's ability to draw male characters, a deliberate comment on how she perceives them, or a failing in my reading?

And I am severely disappointed that Gallant did not address this difference in the treatment of the secrets of and the problem of truly knowing male and female characters, as well as the extent to which the characters are able to truly know each other, in her prefatory remarks.

I did make an effort to read one of Hébert's novellas ("Est-ce que je te dérange?") in French. It was tough going, and I ended up reading it almost side by side with its English translation. As with the other works I've read, the story in English reads with deceptive simplicity. The poetry of the mood, the rhythm of the language, calls for a precision of vocabulary, tense, syntax that is more challenging than I expected (this is true also of the English versions, on closer inspection).

That makes 4 novellas in this collection plus an earlier one that I've read. By far my favourite is The Burden of Dreams, which I mentioned previously. I may yet venture to read more some day.

Mood is everything, with a languorous intensity.

Through the eyes of a child

She tells me, "You have to try to see it through the eyes of a child." I argue that the child already sees everything through the eyes of a child. It's the adults who demand the aids, the lavish hooks to drag out their long-buried imaginations. My mother-in-law and I have been at odds regarding Disneyworld for years. I simply don't see the point.

The child sees. The real trick, I think, is for adults to do the same — to see the mundane from a 3-foot-high, naive perspective. For this there is no help from — and no need for — Disney, only a child's lead into one's own soul.

It's with a melancholy accompanied by a certain level of discomfort that I realize the most poetic, most "romantic" moments I've experienced in recent years are those shared with my child: strolls through the neighbourhood, ice cream, playing in the park.

She tells me she loves me 100 times a day, that I'm beautiful, that I smell good.

The act of poetry, I think, is entwined in vision and creation. Through Helena's eyes I see things differently, and better. We see grand kingdoms in the clouds and in spider webs. We draw, we make music, we make up words.

This child is a natural stream of consciousness, a surrealist extraordinaire for whom the world is her own cadavre exquis.

One weekend we frolic, in my mother-in-law's backyard pool overlooking the river. My daughter's father stands metres off, feeding his own soul, fishing off the dock.

She wants to swim. It is I who watches over her, plays with her, teaches her, consoles her. My soul is left to feed off her throwaway gestures and words.

Against the background of chlorinated water in a tiled basin. Her eyes are pool blue, we tell her. No, she laughs: "The pool is an eye. Swim in my eye." The pool watching us fathom its own depths.

The burden of books

I've been antsy this week, for numerous reasons, and having trouble settling on something to read.

I've been reading Rilke this summer — his correspondence with Louis Andreas-Salomé — but the intensity of the emotion and poetry therein I am unable to support for more than a dozen or so pages at a time. I am taking time to digest it, and I fear the time to articulate what it is fomenting within me will be longer still.

But I needed something to read in the métro yesterday, and given the week I've been having, Rilke would not make an easy companion. In addition, I needed to find reading material for our upcoming stay at the cottage.

It is almost unfortunate that I pulled Anne Hébert ("Collected Later Novels") from the stack. I was immediately drawn in and finished the first of the collection, The Burden of Dreams, by far the longest of the lot, a solid third of the book, before we've even left town.

It's last year's visit to Kamouraska that inspired me to look up Anne Hébert in the first place. I haven't made it to that novel yet (Kamouraska), but I sense almost any of her work would be a fitting read on our impending journey from the big city through small-town Quebec and into the wilderness.

This morning I resorted to rereading Héloïse, the only work of hers I'd ever read and years ago, in the métro (and what better place! Summary: Bernard glimpses Héloïse, a kind of other-wordly anachronism, in the métro, becomes obsessed with her, yet marries the woman he no longer loves), so as not to deplete my vacation reading material, and to inform my current reading in light of that haunting story.

At lunch I went to the library to pick out an Anne Hébert novel in French. The simplicity of the language in English translation leads me to believe that the original French may lie within my grasp.

The writing style reminds me of Michael Ondaatje. The poetry of the language, to paint a mood, spare but precise. The way the story skips through time.

The protagonists in Héloïse and The Burden of Dreams, Bernard and Julien respectively, are both poets, romantics, their very being swept up in an idea. Julien in particular loses himself in music (I'm listening to Mozart and Schubert today on Hébert's suggestion. How is it that she should write of them in the same breath, while I should have in my possession a CD featuring works by just the two of them?) and literature.

He reads poems and novels. He is transported to a world without limits, one where strange sensations and astonishing characters abound. A second existence doubles the little life he leads as ideal employee and well-behaved lover.

Julien crosses the ocean: "Following in Baudelaire's footsteps he tastes the spleen of Paris..." (Baudelaire has shadowed my own summer in various ways...)

She insisted on paying for her ticket and now she has taken a seat next to him, on the threadbare velvet bench. Their two profiles stand out, somewhat solemn and overlapping slightly, like royal profiles on a postage stamp. He keeps brushing against her with his knee and shoulder. The music absorbs them and exempts them from any movement, any word. Their deepest complicity comes from their twofold living warmth, perceived through their garments that touch each other in the muggy darkness of the concert hall.

Her hand, burning hot, somewhat limp and relaxed among the folds of her skirt, the smooth cold ring on the fourth finger. Julien has brushed against that hand, has felt the hard ring under his fingers. From that moment on, he became less attentive to the concert, as if irritated by a sudden dissonance, shocked by a false note that reverberates and echoes all through the hall.

Several times she has looked at her watch and now, barely seated across the table from him on the terrace of a café, she announces that friends are expecting her, that she promised them long ago . . .

Julien says:

"That ring you're wearing?"

But the ring is no longer on her finger, for she dropped it into her bag as soon as the concert was over. Her hands are perfectly bare now, long and smooth. She shrugs.

"I wore it for the concert, that's all. Afterwards it's too much trouble, I have no need of jewellery, since I'm sober and austere by nature — and divorced into the bargain."

She speaks quickly. Seems anxious to provide whatever information he may request.

"What are your friends like?"

"Young, happy, a little crazy. I have lots of fun with them."

"And with me?"

"With you? It's rather the opposite. Aside from your eccentricities, which intrigue me, I wonder what it is about you I find amusing. Unless your dear bewildered face secretly makes me swoon?"

Everything she says is murmured very softly, in a sweet voice filled with laughter and tender irony.

He has only a little time to be with her. At any moment she may disappear, taken up by her hidden life. And then Julien's loneliness in Paris risks becoming very great. He questions her like a judge who persists in trying to compromise someone who is slipping away. How long has she been divorced? Does she play a musical instrument?

"I play the piano sometimes."

She become impatient, leans across the table towards him.

"You spoil everything with your questions. I am the way I am, just as you see me here, across from you, only passing through, with no past or future."

She rises, both hands pressed against the table.

"My name is Camille Jouve. I'm thirty years old. My double life is none of your business. Imagine whatever you want."

For the moment I think Hébert is wrong to invest this emotional complexity in such youthful characters. Young love may be tragic, but her stories are marked by an awareness of tragedy, altogether more tragic, that her characters do not see, that can be seen only in retrospect and maturity. That is, these young people are not wholly genuine; they are clearly stamped with a future that looks back on them. Or maybe it's only age that allows me to read it this way.

The burden of books, the problem with losing yourself in books, as Hébert's protagonists have done, as I have done, is that eventually the poetry of books spills out into real life, can no longer be contained.

Ocean

"Can we go down to the ocean, Mommy?"

What, right now? Is she not enjoying our cottage weekend? Does she mean on a subsequent vacation? I grapple with subtext, while Helena lifts her arm, points through the trees. Ah.

"You mean the lake..."

"What's the difference between ocean and lake?"

I stumble over some distinguishing characteristics: size, location, flora and fauna. I listen to myself ramble about saltwater and freshwater, and realize interestedly that to me, for some reason, this is the feature that demarcates the difference. I don't think Helena is paying attention anymore...

"Once when I was crying really, really hard my tears fell into my mouth and it was salty but it tasted good so I licked them up. Is that like the ocean?"

[Last weekend we went to the cottage. We leave tomorrow morning for a repeat performance.]