The world is a scintillant and fascinating place

Anticipation, when it occurs, often makes me animated and expansive, as if I am perhaps reviving and honing my senses in preparation for the awaited object: yes indeed, the world is a scintillant and fascinating place when a half-remembered mystery leans within reach.

(Her Japanese tapestries. My custom armchair. A former lover. An old book.)

I mostly read Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, at the spa, fitting I think because it's so meditative, nothing happens and nothing happens at the spa and it's a good place to contemplate minutiae. I'm not sure how I heard about this book, even though I try to keep track; it may have been in relation, somehow, to the Tournament of Books, possibly mentioned among the many excellent longlisted novels that failed to be shortlisted over the years, or it may have been some forum discussion somewhere regarding books about nothing, which I may have come across while googling something concerning some other book about nothing that I'm reading now (like, say, Orbital, or Ana Patova) or that I have read in the past several months (so many books where nothing happens). Even though I'm reading an ebook borrowed from the library, it thrills me to know Pond has been published as a Fitzcarraldo edition, gawd I love French flaps.

Be careful though, be very careful with flaked almonds; they are not at all suitable for morose of faint-hearted types and shouldn't be flung about like confetti because almonds are not in the least like confetti. On the contrary, flaked almonds aught not to touch one another and should be organised in simple patterns, as on the side of a pavlova, and then they are quite pretty and perfectly innocuous. But shake out a palmful of flaked almonds and you'll see they closely resemble fingernails that have come away from a a hand which has just seen the light of day.

There's a thing I read, and I thought it was in Pond, about a feeling that's like the feeling of having a neighbourhood cat that you see regularly and then you don't for some time, but you know it's there — a kind of comfort in and familiarity with the rhythm of a place — until one day you wonder if it's ok, I haven't see Simone all winter because it's winter but the time before that it had been a while and I was so relieved to finally see her patrolling her usual stretch of sidewalk, I'd wondered if she'd moved away or some other fate befell her. I think the worry was entirely my own, and not in the passage I was looking for, the worry came to me because it reminded me of Simone (Rosie has never warmed to her, Simone is very friendly, a bit of a slut really, with the sweetest little mew). Of course when I went looking for this passage I couldn't find it, just this bit about the cat that walks up and down the drive with you, but I can't think what other thing I've been reading that would evoke this tangential thought.

I won't be able to write emails like that again you see — that's to say I won't be able to write emails like that for the first time again. And that really was what made them so exciting — using language in a way I'd not used it before, to transcribe such an intimate area of my being that I'd never before attempted to linguistically lay bare. It was very nice I must say to every now and then take a break from cobbling together yet another overwrought academic abstract on more or less the same theme in order to set down, so precisely, how and where I'd like my brains to be fucked right out.

It is fitting that this library ebook should expire today, on the last day covered by my spa passport. The passport was unknowingly the smartest recent purchase I made (excepting the custom armchair [the perfect reading nook at last!] since my formerly favourite chaise longue just didn't fit this corner of the room, and this corner was just crying out for a place to sit with a book and a cat; and maybe the porcelain clay), a Christmas gift to myself, I've been going to the spa two or three times a week since, just to relax, I need help relaxing, I didn't know I was going to be laid off, lucky thing too because I've been able to go to the spa any time of day. I'd never really appreciated the sauna until I went to Norway where I'd exit the sauna to plunge into the North Sea, and this was loosely replicated again this past fall in Denmark. My local is a weird little spa, not sure whom I'd recommend it to, it's in an unsuspecting block building, an industrial commercial zone, but I can walk to it from my house in six minutes, which means I can go after dinner or when I roll out of bed in the morning, which is priceless, even if it doesn't have a view over a river and I have to walk past the tracks through the dodgy backstreet with the loading dock for the grocery store to get there. Inside is quite cleverly designed, you have no sense of the traffic that lies just a few metres beyond the slatted wood. In fact I'll bring Pond with me today so I can search one last time for that passage about the cat (maybe it's a dog, and I'm not suggesting that just because the narrator remembers a cat instead of a dog in a book she'd read, the dog was named Lynx after all, I think she's harsh on herself for misremembering, I think that was a perfectly fine detail to stand out, it's more tangible than actions and behaviours, it's only natural for the brain to fill in memories around a keystone, whereas in my case, I'm not frustrated with focusing on the "wrong" detail but that I can't find the source of it at all, this passage I remember may even be about a person, it's just that it reminded me of Simone, who happens to be a cat. Was it another book entirely? But I associate it with this one, and also I feel like I felt this feeling of association while at the spa, because this is the book I've spent most of my time with, albeit relaxed and unfocused time, an environment that nurtures looseness (of muscle, mind), a loosening of hangups (and associations), the brain fog shifts into brain fuzziness (altogether softer, kinder, warmer). Or is it possible I hadn't read anything at all to prompt this "remembered feeling"? My mind simply wandered to thoughts of home and the nieghbourhood and I thought of Simone, and in a bit of reverse trickery my brain associated this sequence to a passage I'd read rather than freely admit my thoughts went to Simone (not even my own cat!) of their own accord.

Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream.

One of the best things about reading Pond was that it led me to discover Claire-Louise Bennett's essay A Formal Feeling: Inside the world of Louise Bourgeois, which is stunning to me, stunningly weird as a review of a book or an exhibition or an experience, by which I mean beautiful, and it makes me think, for once, about how other people approach Louise Bourgeois and how art makes other people feel something completely different than what I feel, and sometimes it seems lesser and less valid, but sometimes it is more and deeper and I think my own thoughts are quite small by comparison. I think more reviews should be written that way.

I'm going to check out Checkout 19 now.

I think I liked sitting there actually; I think I felt as if I'd just come home from school on a Thursday. Nobody was taking any notice of me yet there was a lovely comforting sensation that beneficent things were being done for me somewhere. I think, as human experiences go, that is one of my favourite ones.

Excerpts
From Morning, Noon & Night 

Reviews 
Fiction That Will Make You Feel Pleasantly Insane (The New Yorker) 
Hmmmm, Stylish (London Review of Books) 

The ignominious mysteries of her life as a woman

The artist Louise Bourgeois, for example, was suddenly all the rage in her last years and finally allowed to come out of the closet and be seen, when her male counterparts had been on the public stage all along, entertaining people with their grandiose and self-destructive behaviour. Yet if one looked at the work of Louise Bourgeois, one saw that it concerned the private history of the female body, its suppression and exploitation and transmogrifications, its terrible malleability as a form and its capacity to create other forms. It was tempting to consider, she said, that Bourgeois's talent relied on the anonymity of her experiences; in other words, that had she been recognised as a younger artist, she might not have had cause to dwell on the ignominious mysteries of her life as a woman, and instead would have been partying and posing for the front covers of magazines along with the rest of them. There were a number of works, she said, executed when Bourgeois was the mother of small children, in which she portrays herself as a spider, and what is interesting about these works is not just what they convey about the condition of motherhood — in distinct contrast, she said, to the perennial male vision of the ecstatically fulfilled madonna — but also the fact that they appear to be children's drawings drawn in a child's hand. It is hard to think, she said, of a better example of female invisibility than these drawings, in which the artist herself has disappeared and exists only as the benign monster of her child's perception. Plenty of female practitioners of the arts, she said, have more or less ignored their femininity, and it might be argued that these women have found recognition easier to come by, perhaps because they draw a veil over subjects that male intellectuals find distasteful, or perhaps simply because they have chosen not to fulfil their biological destiny and therefore have had more time to concentrate on their work. It is understandable, she said, that a woman of talent might resent being fated to the feminine subject and might seek freedom by engaging with the world on other terms; yet the image of Bourgeois's spider, she said, seems almost to reproach the woman who has run away from these themes and left the rest of us stuck, as it were, in our webs.

— from Kudos, by Rachel Cusk.

It's a remarkable coincidence that I should be reading this just weeks after having discovered Louise Bourgeois and with a couple of volumes of her art and writings now at my side.

This passage is key also to my understanding of this novel, as Cusk's narrator vanishes before our eyes.

Sometimes it's a hydra writhing

The creative energy seems to be related to that gushing of emotional force slightly diverted by a soothing hand. reassurance of the right kind. That reassurance which transforms the hate into work, may come from a certain amount of past success, or a "certitude" of attaining some may be a form of being wanted,

Sometimes it's a hydra writhing and sometimes it is a sea of lava

In the mornings when I wake up it is right under my fingers if I touch my heart, tense in a angry silence. Any fear as tiny or unjustified as can be open the dam. Pouring of aggressive reproaches, 

—  from The Return of the Repressed: Psychoanalytic Writings, by Louise Bourgeois.

I'm struggling to finish reading a novel I don't like. Everything I read these days starts off as a good idea, until it bores me. Lately I'd arrived at some self-realization, with the further aim to better see myself, know myself — reading no longer provides the access to myself it once did. Instead, finally, I strive to engage in acts of creation, but I struggle to do so.

This is what my days consist of:

• One lost right mitten, one hyper-insulated left mitten repurposed as a phone case.
• One 4,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, a landscape in Croatia that radiates a calm, cool, entirely imaginary warmth.
• One broken fine-crystal champagne flute. I'm devastated for about an hour, and am truly surprised that a possession of this sort, of mine, lasted 30 years (enduring regular usage over the last 5).
• One 352-day streak of language-app German lessons. Aber ich verstehe nicht.
• One-third of a 5-pound bag of beets found moldering away in the depths of my refrigerator.
• Too much work.
• One box of company swag. Scarf and toque, among other things, but no mittens (or champagne flutes).
• The occasional respite with a lover and a flask of single malt on a park bench or in a hotel room, violating the spirit of curfew and limitations on social gatherings.
• One dead houseplant, succumbed to a draft. Two other plants struggling with hydration issues, or possibly fatigue.
• Three sculptures in progress (two clay, one soapstone). This is the part of the process where I lay down my tools for several weeks or even months and think about what I'm trying to achieve.
• Contact info for a psychotherapist. Just sitting with it for now.

By chance, while looking for inspiration or guidance, I discovered the art of Louise Bourgeois (how did I not know her name before now?). It speaks to me. It's organic, visceral, and weirdly erotic. I ordered a book, for a more coherent retrospective, and insight, than internet can give me. What I see as "intestinal" may be that internal writhing hydra.

[I want to sculpt bodies, my body, bodies I know, maybe the bodies of insects (see Maman, only think Clarice Lispector). I want to turn bodies inside out. How do you turn stone into pillowy flesh?]