Walking toward my own perimeter

Anyone who takes gentle care of a cow is someone I trust. It's a more telling characteristic of a person than taking Communion. Certainly more telling than good teeth.

I wanted to like this book. I love the idea of this book. I didn't love this book. 

I love the title of this book. I bought it in the company of my mother and my daughter. It was a joke between us. Only I would read it and be disappointed by it, but it brought three generations together, we repeatedly referenced it and laughed.

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, by Rivka Galchen, is about the astronomer Johannes Kepler's illiterate mother, who was accused of witchcraft (true story). Meanwhile, a plague is brewing, and politicians have sunk the Empire into a state of war (also, true story).

Galchen portrays Katharina as financially independent, strong-spirited, and respected as a healer and neighbour. Until she wasn't.

As I was returning home that night on the narrow path that runs along the side of the Junker's property, I saw a crowd of young peasant girls, eleven-and twelve-year-olds or so. Maybe one or two younger. The girls were carrying bricks to that kiln rum by Lorenz Neher. I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but, for some reason, this day I saw that I was walking to the end of my life, and they were walking into their bloom. They were walking toward the center of their lives, and I was walking toward my own perimeter. I'm not usually detained by fanciful nonsense like that. It was a curious angle of the sun, of late light. 

What a peculiar time, when science and witchcraft could exist, both equally subject to suspicion, alongside the Protestant Reformation. People were so readily swayed and could be turned against each other. The "case" against Katharina was a regular witch hunt.

According to a Vulture profile, "Galchen’s women do not tick off any of the three dominant boxes in contemporary fiction: mad, bad, or sad. What they are most frequently is unorthodox." Unorthodox women, all witches.

The novel is full of historical detail, it puts a parade of colourful villagers on display, and it's funny. I read it just after I'd read Tyll, thus possibly surpassing my quota of 17th-century Germanic quasi-magical plague-adjacent stories.

Maybe I was disappointed because my mother is not a witch. Or because I'm not a witch. Maybe I wish people accused me of witchcraft. I wish I was the kind of woman people accused of witchcraft. I hope my daughter thinks of me as a witch, as a source of strength and healing power.

"Luther said that even if the earth were to end tomorrow, he would still plant his tree. I've been thinking about that."

"Where do you get your brightness from?" I asked her.

She said she got it from me.

See also
London Review of Books
Camp TOB 2021 discussion: Part 1, Part 2 
CBC: Writers and Company

"Peculiarity is something true rumpling the bedsheets of assumption"

"Forget about forecasting; even nowcasting is near impossible."

The ending made me so sad. Everything just disintegrated. It made me sad for all the relationships I'd ever had where we ended up not understanding each other. That is: all the relationships.

Atmospheric Disturbances, by Rivka Galchen, is full of atmosphere and also full of disturbances. The disturbances range from the small linguistic oddities that our narrator finds so endearing and bothersome about his wife, to cumulative cumulus effects on my psyche, such that I wonder if any person is the same person one moment to the next and all attempts to ever know anyone are doomed.

What was it that poetic charlatan Lacan said, something about how because we only see ourselves in mirrors we come to know ourselves "in the fictional direction"?

This book holds a mirror up to the reader for me to identify my own fictional direction, to know the narrative I call my life. That is, it got under my skin and affected me deeply.

Leo, a psychiatrist, is quite clearly a little bit completely crazy when he proclaims that his wife Rema has disappeared (of her own volition or possibly kidnapped) and that the woman in his apartment, in his bed, who looks like her and talks like her is an imposter, a simulacrum, a doppelganger, who may or may not be aware of her role as a fake. The longer he observes her, the clearer it is that she is displaying learned behaviour in an effort to pass as the original. Leo is an unreliable narrator extraordinaire.

Slowly Leo reveals the backstory of their life together. Rema is much younger than he is and a recent immigrant from Argentina.

I thought about saying something about Borges, but I know that I have a problem with coming off as pretentious, and I was worried that bringing up Borges might appear showy, even though every introverted schoolboy reads Borges, so it's rather ambiguous what such a reference would or should indicate. Another reason I generally don't like to mention Borges is because often a response will be to the effect of he has no emotion, and I hate hearing that said, because it is so wrong, and it's not a discussion that I like to get into. In retrospect I know that Rema would have agreed with me, but back then, I wanted to protect Rema from saying anything that might make me not like her.

There's a lot of second-guessing involved in how he relates to her. And there are a lot of gaps, both in what they know of each other, and what Leo chooses to share with us. Things may or may not be given the importance they deserve.

Meanwhile, one of Leo's patients has gone missing from the hospital. Harvey has a "conflict with the consensus view of reality"; he believes he can control the weather and works as a secret agent for a meteorological society who oppose a group known at the 49 Quantum Fathers who profit from investments based on weather fluctuations across parallel worlds.

And as I spoke — my gaze fixed on the stain on Harvey's shirt — I further estranged myself from myself, so that while one part of me talked to Harvey, another part thought about a certain shade of pale green that happened to be the exact shade of pale green that the newspaper once published as having been calculated by astronomers to be the color of the universe, after which a correction appeared in the following week's paper stating that a math error had been made, and that the astronomers now realized the universe, if you could stand outside of it and see it, was actually a shade of beige. (Willed depersonalization is entirely normal, a valid, even laudable, coping technique. Only unwilled depersonalization would be a cause for concern.)

Rema had encouraged Leo to encourage Harvey in his "delusions"as a way of controlling his behaviour. (Maybe she's gone off in search of Harvey on her own.)

It's all a bit mind-bendy. Leo goes to Argentina and discovers things about Rema's past from her mother. He encounters another Rema — but is it the original, or the copy, or a different copy? Leo goes to Patagonia to help Harvey with his work.

Two details jumped out at me, to which I can't find any reference in the published reviews. First, a child's jack under the fridge. Second, the fact, learned in passing and mentioned only the one time, that Rema had had an ectopic pregnancy, about which she'd been very calm. Both these things point to a child that never was, or was and then wasn't. The kind of thing that could break a marriage, or colour it.

There's something else going on in this novel about everyone's relationship to their father, how they forgot to mention that they did or didn't have one.

We don't tell people everything. Not even those closest to us. Maybe we would be crazy to do so.

And yet we blame each other for failing to see each other as we are.

I hate that feeling, of having a feeling within me that just vibrates but that has nowhere to go, like sound in a vacuum, never being received.

Excerpts
NPR: 1. On a temperate stormy night
Tablet: 3. What may be highly relevant
Guernica: 13. We exchange words, not pleasures

Review.

A sentimental, decadent cult

Stop Global Warming and Save the Polar Bears!

The polar bear speaks up, and it makes me want a bicycle:

"The bicycle is beyond all doubt the most excellent invention in the history of civilization. The bicycle is the flower of the circus stage, the hero of every environmental policy. In the near future, bicycles will conquer all major cities in the world. And not just that: Every household will have its own generator attached to a bicycle. You'll be able to get fit and produce electricity at the same time. You can also get on your bicycle to pay your friends a spontaneous visit instead of first calling them on your cell phone or sending an email. When we utilize the multifunctional capacity of the bicycle, many electronic devices will eventually become superfluous."

I saw dark clouds gathering about several of the faces. Putting even more power into my voice, I continued: "We will ride to the river on our bikes to do our laundry. We'll ride our bikes to the forest to collect firewood. We don't need washing machines anymore, and we don't have to rely on electricity or gas to heat our apartments or cook our meals." Several faces were amused by these fanciful proposals, displaying unobtrusive laugh creases, while others turned gray as stone. Not a problem, I cheered myself on, don't let them intimidate you. Pay no attention to these bores. Relax! Ignore this wrong audience, imagine yourself standing before hundreds of ecstatic faces and keep talking. This is a circus. Every conference is a circus.

The chair coughed dismissively, as if to show he had no intention whatever of dancing to my tune. Then he exchanged intimate glances with a bearded official seated beside him. I remembered that the two men had entered the room side by side. The official, thin as a nail, wore a matte black suit even though he wasn't at a funeral. He began to speak without first asking permission: "Rejecting automobiles and worshipping bicycles: This is a sentimental, decadent cult already familiar to us from Western countries. The Netherlands are a good example. But supporting machine culture is a matter of the utmost urgency. We must provide logical connections between places of employment and residential areas. Bicycles create the illusion that one might ride anywhere one likes at any time. A bicycle culture could exert a problematic influence on our society." I raised my hand to contradict this line of argumentation. But the session leader ignored my hand and announced the lunch break. I left the room without a word to anyone and ran out of the building like a schoolchild running onto the playground.

—from Memoirs of a Polar Bear, by Yoko Tawada.

Imagine a bicycle-driven future! Perhaps the most problematic influence on our society is the Establishment. See through the illusions.

Memoirs of a Polar Bear will be released November 8. I was eager to read a review copy on the basis of Rivka Galchen (whom I revere on the basis of a single "essay") having referred to the author's whatness as Yoko Tawada's Magnificent Strangeness.

It's early pages still, but if the polar bear is expressing her concern about having missed the forecast for the weather change of the Prague Spring, I'm guessing climate may be a running thread, whether ecological, social, or political.

Excerpt.

Other people's babies

In her short essay "The Beginning of Misunderstanding," Rivka Galchen observes:

It's as if babies don't grow larger but instead smaller, at least in our perception.

Babies are all potential. Their acquiring the ability to communicate shatters this illusion of endless possibility. Their personhood is limited and delimited, made concrete. They become someone specific.

Helena is now very much someone specific. This fills me with relief, pride, astonishment, trepidation, and a little sadness. She's a teenager now.

Every so often, I realize she's grown, she's someone different. It's like I meet her anew, and have to reestablish a rapport; I have to get to know her all over again. Obviously, we don't continually restart from zero. But every day she's something more than the day before, and I spend the day identifying what the more is and determining how to deal with it.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Little Labors. The book's beauty is in its juxtapositions: Small things, like the orange snowsuit, nosy neighbours, The Pillow Book, and Lucille Ball's pregnancy. And big things, like women writers and a whole world of maternal anxieties and deeper truths.

Little Labors warped time a little for me, and made me meditative and introspective. Which is, in my view, one of the best things a book can do.

Reviews
Feministing
NPR
Slate

Her fearlessness

From Little Labors, by Rivka Galchen:


My own little labor of 23 hours, now a work in progress of thirteen and a half years, is away on a school trip for a few days, so when I'm not working long hours, I'm reading little things.

This little book makes me unreasonably happy, just looking at it, all orange joy with pink and yellow, so small and tactile and easy.

I bought this book on the basis of having read Galchen's essay in the New Yorker, The Only Thing I Envy Men.

So it's about motherhood and the creative process, and the intersection and interruption of those things, their juxtaposition, and the ambivalence of feeling in Galchen's relationship to those things.

I'm surprised by how strongly I relate to this book, being that I'm no longer the mother of a baby, that that experience is not immediate. I want to buy this book for nonmothers to say, this is what it's like, but for mothers too, to say, remember?

It's about creation, and other things. Fresh and lovely.

Envy

A friend brought to my attention this wonderful "essay" by Rivka Galchen in the New Yorker, The Only Thing I Envy Men.

I write "essay" after looking for how the magazine labels it. It's a memoir (probably) but it reads like a short story, with wit, poignancy, and unexpected twists.

She starts off discussing "women writers" and I expected her to envy men that they hold the default position. This is true in part, but it runs much deeper that; it pokes gentle fun at our gender biases, but then picks away at the biological basis for how men and women form different emotional attachments.

Let me tell you why I love this "essay." Go read it first, I don't want to spoil it for you. It's short and lively.

First, doesn't it make you want to read everything? Helen DeWitt, Dorothy Hughes, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, Even Virginia Woolf. The joy of recognition: yes, I've read Natsuo Kirino.

For many years, Shirley Jackson was nearly the only "woman writer" I had read. Then, around age twenty-five, I had the blunt experience of looking at my bookshelves and noticing that my bookshelves were filled almost exclusively with books by men. Which was fine, I wasn't going to get in a rage about it, I loved those books that I had read. But I was unsettled, since my bookshelves meant either there were no good books by women, or I had somehow read in such a way as to avoid them all. I had never had my Jane Austen phase or Edith Wharton phase or even George Eliot phase, I associated those writers with puberty, or "courting," both things that repelled me. (I now know I was stupid to feel that way.) But, like I said, I wasn’t going to rage at myself, or at the world, I was just going to try to read some books by women. But where to start?

Second, it turns the issue of gender biases in literature and publishing on its head. What makes the writing of a woman writer so womanly? What makes Walser and Kafka sound "female," in Galchen's opinion? I love how she persists in believing Denis Johnson is a woman, even while being surprised that his book was written by a woman.

Third, it goes where good girls don't. It considers the possibility of (female) sexual behaviour without bearing the burdens of its consequences. It considers motherhood without the burden of children. The possibility of covert babies.

Fourth, it makes me wonder about the metaphorical children, the creative works that authors nurture and give birth to, letting them make their own way in the world. Do men and women relate to those offspring differently? Are women held to task for these children, while men more easily dissociate from them?

The essay comes from Galchen's book, Little Labors, due out in May. I'll be checking it out, along with everything else she's ever written.