You want to be a positive nothing

But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as something in the first place? [...] You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing. 

— from "New Year's Resolution," in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, by Lydia Davis.

He asks me about my summer, have I taken vacation. I mumble noncommittally. 

I feel the nitrile graze my lip as he positions his fingers inside my mouth. My lip reacts and I suppress my lip from reacting, it is like being touched without being touched, there is no tenderness but it is a gentle sensation.

I tell myself to relax the muscles of my face, around the corners of my mouth, and at my left temple. I wonder how good he is at reading faces. Can he read trepidation? Does he see pain? Has he learned to ignore it? Does he respond to it, does it influence his examination? Maybe he leans into it, tries to extrude it like a fleck of debris with his scaler.

I feel a twinge deep in the gum above an upper canine, I think I am reflexively wincing, I tell myself not to wince, I don't actually feel pain, I don't want him to see pain, there is no pain. It tickles a little.

The motor doesn't sound so loud, like I'm hearing everything through a woolen sock, only the sock is lining the inside of my head. 

I think about how like it is to the rotary tool I have to sand and finish my sculptures. He is polishing the enamel, and I am like stone, stone flesh with detached nerves, a soft core deep inside wondering how much can the body bear, when will the outer shell crack. But the vibrations are almost delicate — am I so inured, or so removed?

*****

I receive in my inbox an excerpt from "Night Bakery" by Fabio Morábito. It begins thusly:

During my time in Berlin I just walked around and didn’t read a single book. In a way I replaced reading with walking.

I think about this for days, while walking cross my new neighbourhood. It's not mine yet, I haven't fully inhabited it. This is a temporary state. I am hovering above the world, above life, before alighting.

I think about all the nonreading and nonwriting, and this unsatisfying nonwalking, the wondering without concluding. I decide to order this book of stories — it takes what feels like hours to find this line again, to find the newsletter, to trace it to its source, to pinpoint the thing that is affecting me — but am dismayed to learn it will not be published till next spring. Time enough for me to write my own stories. I think all fiction is speculation.

I stumble across a list that looks like the bibliography of my writing project of the last two years. "The books in this list explore, inhabit, and investigate physical hunger." Is it physical?

*****

One day I need to run an errand in the old neighbourhood. I have coffee before setting out, and browse headlines on my phone. I realize the NYRB fiction issue is out, and I think I should pick up a copy. (I want to be the kind of person who picks up the fiction issue. Do I want to be seen or known as the kind of person who picks up the fiction issue? I believe the being seen and being known are not important to me, it's the being that's important, but I can't be sure.) 

My errand becomes two errands. The original errand is crucial and time-sensitive, other people rely on its completion for their comfort and well-being, but the new errand born of impulse and frivolity becomes the day's focus.

I finally find a copy and am relieved that it feels right and familiar. This is the kind of person I am. (I know these books reviewed by authors of other books I know.)

I have not read it cover to cover. I skim the review of Batuman's Either/Or and check my hold at the library; it will easily be September before I read it, my daughter will have started university. (While on the library site, I realize I am #1 on 0 copies of a book that is not available and wonder how I was allowed to reserve it.)

I glance at the piece on Gainza'a Portrait of an Unknown Lady and hope that when I read it later it will enlighten me. What is it about Gainza's books, which I don't particularly enjoy, that inspire me to stubbornly poke and prod at things I don't understand, which — the poking and prodding — I also don't particularly enjoy?

And here, there is a review of Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men, which title stops me in my tracks.

This mesmerizing oddity opens with a prefatory couple of pages about something—some sort of memoir or testimony—that the narrator has just finished writing:

I was gradually forgetting my story. At first, I shrugged, telling myself that it would be no great loss, since nothing had happened to me, but soon I was shocked by that thought. After all, if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of King Lear or of Prince Hamlet that William Shakespeare had taken the trouble to relate in detail.

I spend days thinking about the title, and thinking about what my story is, it's not one story, it's a multitude. I spend those same days reminding people around me, and myself, that while we may be the hero of our own life, we are not the centre of other people's universes. 

It's many more days before I read the review of Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men and determine that I should read this novel, even while the review is less about the book than it is about the violent and mysterious age we find ourselves in, as Deborah Eisenberg puts it, "our current, very alarming moment." I find myself nodding. 

I am the kind of person who picks up a copy, thumbs through it, sets it aside, packs it in her bag to have something to read while waiting, opens it and refolds it, flips back to find that one sentence that caught her eye, thinks about making time to read it later. 

*****

There is blood, as usual. I wonder how normal the bleeding is. I don't talk to people about it because I am ashamed. It is a moral shortcoming that I don't floss as often as I should.

Can he sense the tension in my jaw, or see the effects of my teeth clenching? He tells me I should take a vacation, I deserve it. 

The pain is part of the whole thing

The other evening I sit with a friend on his balcony having a glass of wine and sharing insights into our hearts and brains and those of our lovers and those whom we'd like to have as our lovers and those who will never be our lovers, and about what happens between flirtation and expectation and reality, and he said something to me about how quick we are (I mean, not us, but people in general) to back away, as soon as any perceived flaw becomes apparent, as soon as our exacting standards are snubbed by the actuality of the flawed human being before us, because they just aren't worth the effort. 

How easy it is to say no (or sometimes nothing at all), how much easier than compassion, than to accept someone's authentic self and engage in the exercise of knowing them, really knowing them, even especially biblically.

I think about how I could've said no to the man, a recent lover, whose behaviour I am now dissecting with my friend on his balcony. It's easy to say no, we have so many reasons to say no, I could've said no because of, well it doesn't matter the many reasons why, but the brave thing is to say yes, to be open to yes. I could've said no, but I said yes, but after some time he said no, I don't know why.

I don't tell my friend this, but I try to say yes as often as possible (unless it's to do with work), and for this I am proud of myself. Carpe diem and all that. The yes is almost always worth it. The yes is the good stuff, the stuff of deathbed reminiscences. Nothing is permanent, everything is temporary. Yes.

I come home late, a little drunk, but lighter, and smiling, and I fall into bed, too alive to be sleeping, I open The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. I read something about something liminal as the character was trying and failing to fall asleep, while I am falling asleep, drifting between Davis's words, feeling the mostly natural chemicals coursing through my blood, feeling these words were written for me in this moment. 

And the next thing I know it's the end of the story, and there's another one, right there on the next page, "He's trying to break it down," and I urgently feel the need to break down what he's breaking down, and it reminds me of how I rationalize buying the expensive shoes, that really, if I wear them on most workdays during the shoulder seasons and then as my indoor shoes through winter, and they're quality shoes, I expect them to last, they're classic, I won't tire of them, every time I wear them will cost me barely a dollar to feel like a million bucks. And it reminds me also of Calvino, that story of the trajectory of the arrow. Only "Break It Down" is about the cost of a weekend getaway, no, it's longer than that, wait, is she a paid escort?, no, it's love, he's breaking down the relationship, he's breaking down the cost of love, he's breaking down, and oh my fucking god. 

I guess you get to a point where you look at that pain as if it were there in front of you three feet away lying in a box, an open box, in a window somewhere. It's hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say, All right, I'll take it, I'll buy it. That's what it is. Because you know all about it before you even go into this thing. You know the pain is part of the whole thing. And it isn't that you can say afterwards the pleasure was greater than the pain and that's why you would do it again. That has nothing to do with it. You can't measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.

Only, a lot of people don't remember that pain, they promptly convert it into armour, and they don't do it again, they've developed an aversion, it's not learned, it's conditioned. 

We forget how painful childbirth, for example, is, because nature wants to ensure we do it again, fulfill an evolutionary imperative. Love is an unknown compared to childbirth, it is not a process with defined stages, certainly it's not as obviously physical, love is nebulous. The experience of it rewires our brains and hardens our hearts in less predictable ways. In this way, many people learn to avoid love. I am learning to embrace it, over and over again, to go into the pain, therein lies the greatest pleasure.

I'd love to tell my friend about this story, it's brilliant, but he's not that kind of friend.

Octobre reading

(Or, French books by guys mostly named Georges.)

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
A readalong brought to you by Frances (Nonsuch Book), with posting on Parts 1, 2, and 3 on October 14, 21, and 28.

The delectable new translation by Lydia Davis everyone's talking about makes it hard to resist. I first read Madame Bovary some 20+ years ago. I didn't care much for it. I'm counting on my being a much wiser woman now to get something more out of it. (I'll be travelling this weekend and leaving the hardcover behind, but I have the original French loaded up on my ereader, in case I'm feeling ambitiously French.)

A Void, Georges Perec
Richard (Caravan de recuerdos) hosts this shared read, discussions taking place between October 29 and November 7.

I've read this one previously as well, back when it was first made available in English, at a time when I was fascinated with things Oulipo and also toying with the idea of pursuing further studies, and some kind of career, in problems with translation (which I never did). The book's conceit is that it is written without the letter "e," the most frequently occurring letter in French and also English). Now how do you translate that? (The Spanish translation has no "a.") I read it then as a puzzle; I'll read it now with, hopefully, appreciation for plot and character, which I've since learned that Perec can in fact do rather well.

Monsieur Monde Vanishes, Georges Simenon
I've been saving this. Having loved Simenon's Strangers in the House recently, I thought another roman dur would be perfect for my coming weekend getaway. The kid and I are flying to DC to visit with my sister for a Canadian Thanksgiving away. Even though it's a short flight, I've given excessively careful consideration to which book it is I want to have on hand when we're told to turn off all electronic devices. This is it.

(For Helena I picked out something called Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute, cuz, well, cyborgs! and lunch! Note: this book is not French. It's by a guy called Jarret J Krosoczka.)

So. Monsieur Monde walks out on his life, according to the back cover, and apart from the fact that I have a fascination with people who do this (I mean, real people actually do this!; it's not just in stories, you know, where he says he's going out to get a pack of smokes and that's the last you hear of him!), the why and how of their doing it, I've spent every day of October, and most of September, thinking about running away (mostly because of my stupid job). Plus it's cold and raining a lot, so it feels right.

Yet another couple of French books
I finished The Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille, and I'm within a few pages of the end of Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, by Pierre Klossowski (acquired during a thankfully short-lived phase of exploring obscure writers whose surnames begin with the letter "k," in some misguided desire to one day be considered one of them).

I can't say I actually recommend either of them — they're not exactly entertaining in any conventional sense. But. The Story of the Eye is an interesting complement to Tom McCarthy's C, the whole sex-death-grieving-dissociation thing. And there's a lot to dissect in Klossowki with regard to sex and gender politics; it's quite philosophical and written in a somewhat dry and academic, but playful, tone, and it could be worth careful study if you have the time or inclination, of which for the time being I have neither.