Walking was writing

(though stillness is another kind of movement; it affects the ground, even if not the wind)

The house I grew up in used to be across the street. That is, it was originally built across the street from its current location. They built the school, and they needed a football field, so they picked up the house and moved it. Coincidentally, the man who lived in the house was the principal of that high school, its first, so presumably he took no issue with the expansion of school property, in fact, probably viewed it as a tangible evidence of his professional legacy. They named the street after him.

Today I also live across the street from a high school. They say we repeat patterns, our parents’ patterns. I repeat my house patterns. I live across the street from the school, behind which run the train tracks. I hear the train sometimes when I lie in bed at night. My dwelling before this one and the one before that were also about the same distance from these tracks that curve through the city. I wonder sometimes if my migration pattern is triangulating, or circling in on something. 

The house I grew up in also has railway tracks run through the block it sits on. They are no longer in use, but when I lived there, I heard the trains, saw them sometimes too, I don’t remember if it was morning or evening or when I came home at lunch, they must have stopped traffic, the tracks swerve across our block to straighten out on the middle of a main street, I don’t remember the traffic, I was oblivious to some things. Funny, I remember the trains but only ever moving in one direction, due east, and then southward toward the border, I wonder if they ever came back. 

The house I call the house I grew up in is the house I lived in for only about seven years, but they were big years, the years of primary and middle school. It was the house I walked to school from and then returned to. We still had a black and white tv. The house the neighbour knocked on the door of to say he thought it was our kitten that had been run over on the next street. It was the house my father died in, the house my brother and sister separately each moved out of, and each moved back in again, the house where a baby squirrel dropped into our kitchen via some duct from the attic, the house with odd creaking noises, sometimes I was scared. The house you could climb out the bedroom window and sit on the roof of the addition. It was the only house on the street with a driveway, because it had a stable in back.

The school’s parking lot was across the street from the school, that is, on the same side of the street the first principal’s house was moved to. The parking lot was irregularly shaped, it did not touch our property, but you could glimpse it through the bushes at the back of the next door neighbours’ garden. I would cut through the parking lot sometimes on the way to the grocery store, or to Cathy’s house, but because of its shape, it wasn’t really a shortcut. Every spring, I would go into the far corner of the lot to tear down some lilacs for my mother for mother’s day. The first time was with my dad, and after he died the lilacs continued to seem like a good idea, my mom loved lilacs. It was only the last year we lived there, or maybe the last two years, that I thought to bring scissors. Probably my dad had, that first time, but in the intervening years I struggled, you can neither snap nor pluck a lilac branch, and this difficulty somehow expanded the illicitness of the operation, the lilacs were not public, and were not the school’s property, they breached the fence that separated a neighbouring garden from the fleet of cars, I knew they belonged to someone else and I liberated them anyway, but it was messy and violent.

I have a lilac tree outside my bedroom window now. Until last week, there was another tree symmetrically flanking my terrace, but it fell victim to a construction fence, or the construction workers, or the school’s expansion and revitalization plans. The building I live in now was built on concrete stilts. This winter we learned, as heavy machinery tore through the old annex building, that our basement has no wall. We stood on the sidewalk and peered into the cellar like it was some cutaway dollhouse, like I could just reach in to extract the garden chairs rather than lug them up the rickety ladder, through the trap door, across my art space and the dining room through the sliding doors.

Hyeseong Cho, The Silence 230914-1

Somehow all this helps to make Houses of Ravicka, by Renee Gladman, make sense. All this, and having travelled to places where there are no street signs, or you don’t know where to find the street signs, or the building numbers aren’t in order, or you discover a place you want to return to but you can never find it again.

First, I left my invisible structure and then I walked. No, first I breathed to descend my structure and then I set out to walk. My immediate neighbors did not seem to notice that my living differed from theirs in that my flat of rooms existed in a geometric impossibility. My rooms opened and closed depending on how air moved through my body, and their rooms did not open and close. For a long time, before I understood my breath, I was stuck in one strange light-filled room. [...] When I'm at home, everywhere I stand is the center space, a space surround by objects, and no matter how far I walk in one direction , the room comes and settles itself around me, until I breathe and am in another room, the room for sleeping, the room where I draw. [...] Living was like writing a long, immersive essay: inside something fluid and labyrinthine, where light shined in at odd angles, even during the new moon. Sleeping was a terrifying pause in writing. Walking was writing. Each room held an essay you wrote as you breathed and the subject of the essay usually had nothing to do with the function of the room, but maybe the room's architecture, for that day, was shaped by the quality of your thinking. First I breathed the steps to my house, and then I descended them. 

For more sensible commentary on this odd novel, see The White Review.

Coincidentally, while preparing to visit my hometown, I browse online for local art galleries and discover an artist who paints street windows and sudden walks. She cites an encounter with Franz Kafka's "The Street Window" as a window onto her perspective, an exploration of the "sudden exposure to the scrutiny of myriad gazes." I hope she's read Gladman, because the happy accident of me discovering her while reading Houses created new doorways for me to step through.

Gladman writes in the afterword:

I was now saying something about [architecture] that allowed me inside structures, no longer running my hand along the exteriors or standing outside looking up at the verticality of them but inside now, occupying space that is not visible from the other side of the wall.

Life was work and also a performance

I perform in art time and in real time, and you can't tell the difference — no one knows how to separate a real act from an art act in my work. 

— Tehching Hsieh

Memory Piece, by Lisa Ko, covers the past, present, and future, with each major section focusing on one of a trio of lifelong friends: respectively, Giselle, the performance artist; Jackie, the techy; and Ellen, the activist. They met as teenagers, bonded over a barbecue.

Giselle's life starts to come into focus for her when she hears about a performance piece that can only be Tehching Hsieh's Rope Piece (for which I will be forever grateful this book introduced me to).

She could not make her mother happy yet felt responsible for her mother's unhappiness. Her coping mechanism was to treat everything like it was a situation, but her performance self and real self had become indistinguishable. Work was a performance; life was work and also a performance. It wasn't that she needed to wait for the perfect idea or invent something new. Instead, she recognized how she could shape her life into the performance itself.

(Perhaps I should treat my life this way: perform as an employee, perform as a writer, perform as a doting daughter, etc. to the best of my ability. Fake it till I make it.)

This is the most interesting section of the book for me — its exploration of art, time, labour, intention, context, posterity.

After months of writing her memories, Giselle had begun to see everything she did as future memory. The mundane could be fabulous; everything became expansive. This made her more daring, because when you saw life through the lens of potential nostalgia, even difficult events could carry the smallest element of fondness for having survived them.

(I think we do this every time we snap a photo.)

In the spirit of archiving the everyday, Jackie pioneers some blog software, but grapples with data management and the battle between democratization and turning a profit. When the dot-com bubble bursts, some of her moral grappling is alleviated. 

But. The novel as a whole doesn't really work for me. It's giving writer workshop. A couple linguistic anachronisms jarred me out of the story (young women were not calling each other "dude" in the early 1990s; similarly "vibe" and "hook up"  appear with clear 2020s usages). It describes the old women of 2040 as if they were the old women of yesteryear. 

Most significantly, I don't understand how we get to that future from here. It's a housing crisis taken to the extreme, compounded by constant surveillance and border checks. Despite the known evils of gentrification, real-estate speculation, property-flipping and vacation rentals, construction industry and municipal corruption, and plain old greed, it doesn't feel right for Ellen's story as a squatter fighting eviction to end up as it does. (At some point I figured that Y2K had transpired as the apocalyptic event some feared it would be. Except even in the novel's reality we know it didn't.) And I'm a little disappointed that aspects of Ellen's alternative living — community building, recycling and waste management, dumpster diving, rooftop-gardening — weren't more fleshed out. 

But, admirably, this novel shows how three women manage to sidestep capitalism. A little.

Giselle said she had stopped identifying as an artist, but she still worked. Art work is work, it's labor. So is working in a café. It's all the same thing.

Activity as volumetric thinker

Looking up at the heavens she howled and cried until she grew hoarse, but even after her voice had given out, her whole body continued to shake. If only she could become a sculpture. Though she had produced many drawings and prints, she had know that she was meant to be a sculptor since her youth. And now, the only way to escape this pain was to become a sculpture herself.

— from 3 Streets, by Yoko Tawada

1. Can I call myself an artist? Yes. Apparently I am emerging. Some of my sculptures are on display at the Montreal Art Center and Museum, June 8-22.

Women sculptors have often been single figures, whose very activity as volumetric thinkers caused consternation. (Penelope Curtis)

2. What am I trying to prove? And I am certain I am trying to prove something. I am, however, not sure if it is to the world or to myself, or to someone else. This is a partial proof that anyone can be an artist. If I can do it, surely anyone can. Or at least anyone who takes the time to respond to a call for submissions, prepare a portfolio and a statement. Anyone who can manage the logistics of exhibiting one's work. Alternatively it is proof that I have some artistic talent. Can both hypotheses be true?

3. Having the goal of exhibition has shaped my time. There are deadlines. Paint must dry. These past months have been exceptionally stress-laden, for life reasons, yet I made a commitment to participate in a group exhibit — an added pressure, but also a distraction from life, even a handy excuse.

4. Would these sculptures have turned out differently without a looming end date? Minimally. In some cases, a decision was forced. I no longer had the luxury of procrastination. But the right decisions were made, of this I am confident. 

5. Some finishing detail was rushed. As I browse work in galleries, I notice the precision I didn't make time for — a sanded contour, a crisper edge, a neater mounting. Such detail can be a differentiator between competent work and confident work. While parts of the process are meditative and slow down time, I need to relearn patience, I need to take more time.

6. How do I title a sculpture? A title can change everything. It gives the viewer a framework, it sets a tone. An artwork must announce itself to the world. It takes a stance. It makes a statement. It tells a story. Sometimes it's an untitled story about nothing in particular.

7. I play a game with myself when I visit galleries and museums: I look at an artwork cold, understand something about it, identify how it makes me feel; then I read the little white label at its side, for its title, year, materials, maybe some other context. And then I look again. This game makes me feel like both a winner and a loser simultaneously, that I am some clever purist exercising her cumulative knowledge and insight but also never fully appreciating what an artist might be trying to say. Is the failing mine or the artist's, I wonder.

8. They say a picture's worth a thousand words. What is a sculpture worth then? Why do we title artworks with words? An artwork can generate a feeling; but a title can help the artwork tell a story. Sometimes I think the title should be able to stand on its own, without the artwork.

9. I read artist statements and laugh at their empty wordiness. I have collected many sample over the years. Enough to fill a book.

10. How do I price a sculpture? Unlike a canvas, I cannot charge by square inch. I can calculate time and materials, but what of found materials? Do I count the time involved for mould-making on top of the time to make the clay original? If I reuse the mould, should I adjust the price? 

11. What is my artwork worth to me? What do I want for it? At this point, mostly I want someone to take it off my hands. I'm not in this for the money. I like the idea of barter pricing, because some things are more useful to me than money. One sculpture is priced at "Removal and disposal of two old hot water tanks from the artist's cellar basement, accessed via trap door and steep step ladder." Another costs "Air duct and dryer vent cleaning in the artist's condo, which may include the removal of animal remains and other debris." But it's only because I'm financially comfortable that I can entertain alternative economic structures.

12. Curatorial philosophies and logistics are confounding me. How do I choose what to display? How many pieces? How do I display them? Painters must choose how to frame their paintings; sculptors must stage their work, in three dimensions. I put my work on a pedestal. Should these platforms conform to each other to forge (a perhaps artificial) cohesiveness of the sculptures, or should they play to each piece's distinctiveness?

13. Where do I find such pedestals? Do I make them, modify them? How do I transport them? How much time have I devoted to the material that supports the art, beyond making the art itself?

Object-sculpture is by it nature materially and spatially assertive, so a sculptor needs logistical and material support as well as the endorsement of others who believe in the undertaking. (Clare Lilley)

14. Here's a smattering of books I've read in recent months (rather, almost years), either directly or tangentially about art and artists, that have shaped some of my art thinking, bringing me to where I am now.

• Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women Since 1945, published on the occasion of the Arts Council Collection Exhibition
• Old in Art School, A Memoir of Starting Over, by Nell Painter
• Like a Sky Inside, by Jakuta Alikavazovic
• Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey
• The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession, by Michael Finkel
• The Deceptions, by Jill Bialosky
• Tell Me I'm an Artist, by Chelsea Martin
• Sirens and Muses, by Antonia Angress
• The Art of Vanishing, by Lynne Kutsukake
• The Exhibitionist, by Charlotte Mendelson
• 3 Streets, by Yoko Tawada

15. Why do writers have so much to say about art?

16. There is so much more I want to say about these books, but I'm not sure I remember what. I read differently now. I regret not blogging, not documenting my response, not writing my way through my opinions. 

17. I've been messing around, playing with art, toying with the idea of art school; if not a degreed program, then workshops in exotic places. What do I hope to accomplish with school? More proof, validation? (Of what?) More importantly, what do I hope to learn?

18. I don't even know how to properly clean a paint brush.

19. I have been making things out of clay and, for the most part, casting them. I want to learn about different casting materials. How do I even begin to go about casting bronze? Where do I get some bronze? Can the things I do with clay be adapted for ceramics? How do different types of clay feel, or behave differently? I have trouble finding answers in books or on the internet. I suspect the answers may come from people, possibly school. I want to experiment with materials, to find the material best suited to the story I want to tell.

20. Perhaps I want to prove that art is easier than literature. The price of admission is lower. It's easy to show my work at the little gallery down the street. People actually stop and look. It's less simple to publish a book. There is no little publisher around the corner. There aren't many people who will casually spend 20 minutes with my writing and spend a few hundred or thousand dollars on it.

21. Perhaps this exercise in art was a warm-up. Or merely a procrastination tactic.

Exhibitions are not the end point of a process. Exhibitions start things, and they begin processes of change and reassessment. They don't close a chapter but open it. (Joy Sleeman)

Gaping holes in the body of her argument, 2024; clay, acrylic. On the beach at Benitses, she came apart at the seams, 2022; plaster, acrylic. 
The body is a construct, the body is a triangle, 2023; hydrostone. Jeremy is a delicate flower, 2024; clay, plaster, acrylic.

The contour lines of her own body had dissolved

The camera, apparatus of the desirous gaze, is made up of a shutter released upon a scene which one feels certain can never be fully contained within a 35 mm frame by a finger that is determined to live in the present moment, full as that moment is of affection, curiosity, and regret toward all those people living through the world's uncontainable time and space. The determination, the hesitation, the joy and fear of the moment when the finger releases the shutter are not about any critical consistency of a journalistic nature, but rather the ethics of the person holding the camera, who, with the rapid movement of a finger, must make an instantaneous decision with that desirous gaze.

I wake early this morning, before daylight, and not being able to fall back asleep, I play Wordle and then Connections, and glance at the forums for the latest developments in work gossip. Finally the sun comes up over the horizon, I get up to pee, and I raise the blinds on the sliding doors from the bedroom to the fire escape, I lower them only part way at bedtime to block the glare from the streetlight that is in my direct line of vision when I lie in bed, why is there a streetlight in the ruelle anyway? I crawl back into bed because it's still early and I pick up the novel I've been reading since forever, Mild Vertigo, by Mieko Kanai, I swear there was still snow on the ground when I started, it came with me to Rhossili Bay in the late spring, on which vacation I read exactly nothing, except only the opening pages of Yukio Mishima's Star, which lovely edition was an impulse purchase at the Tate Modern, I managed to squeeze in a visit, specifically to see an exhibit of Maria Bartuszova's plaster work, all the lovely little Penguins lined up at the checkout as I paid for my solitary souvenir postcard (my studio is beginning to look a little like this, with experimental plaster fragments, the card now tacked to the wall as inspiration), and I couldn't resist starting to read it on my way back to Paddington before embarking west, but on this trip I only walked and walked and rested, and walked and sang and danced, and rested, only on two evenings did I opt to watch Netflix (Black Mirror, as it happens), otherwise quickly dropping off to sleep.

And Mild Vertigo came with me to Kabelvåg, but on this trip appropriately enough I was reading A House in Norway, by Vigdis Hjorth, and also not traveling alone so more likely to chat over a drink than to sit quietly with a book, although we shopped for books, and this included a miniquest for books by Jon Fosse who was announced Nobel laureate at about the same time as I landed in Oslo, the quest requirement being that it be in English and not be a behemoth, I very quickly settled on Aliss at the Fire as a small yet sufficiently representative work, I'm so tired of reading privileged self-indulgent white men who are somehow above the slash of an editor's pen, I didn't find a copy, but I've since ordered a Fitzcarraldo edition, and as I write this I glance up and note the other postcard on my studio wall from a show in Bergen, Ahmed Umar, whose polished, organic sculptural objects were all mounted on plaster casts of his hand in prayer emerging from the wall, what am I to do with my casts, the malformed latex gloves, make some comment on women's work and domesticity?

It's only in the last few weeks that I've been reading Mild Vertigo again in earnest, and hoping my reading mojo is back, coaxing it back to life, my only regret being that it's not a Fitzcarraldo edition, I love French flaps, released coincidentally on the day I'd returned home from Wales and became aware of it only when my daughter had friends over for her birthday, and I'd grabbed my book and a drink intending to move to a quiet corner and give them some space, when one of the girls said she had that book only a Fitzcarraldo, I wonder now if it includes Kate Zambreno's afterword, because that's a stroke of genius, juxtaposing her essay over Kanai's text, which similarly lays a narrative over and around a creative essay about an exhibition of Nobuyoshi Araki and Kineo Kuwabara photography (loosely positioning them as journalist vs artist, respectively, characterized by cruelty vs compassion, respectively). I read Zambreno when I vacationed in Mexico, was that two years ago already, I don't think I ever wrote about it, it felt like research, preparatory, an immersion in process, when all I wanted to do was write, maybe I was heartbroken, probably I was, reading and writing were always therapy (do I no longer require therapy of this kind?). Here Zambreno writes, "I don't want to make it personal [...] but how else, to show the interior of an experience of a novel like this, how a novel invades you, as much as you invade it?" I love this, in fact, often the invasion interests me more than the novel itself.

I read in bed this morning and doze off about once per page, I'm late for work, I don't care, this is blissful, occasionally my phone buzzes and I glance at the message. I'm not sure why I was invited to this group chat, the girls from university, it makes me slightly uncomfortable, I moved away from that town decades ago, I am still friends with them to differing degrees, although one of them, I barely know her at all; but now I know that her marriage is breaking down. I met them for dinner a year ago, and before that, never as a group, I wonder how they came to flock together in recent years, college days solidifying into a pillar supporting their midlife lives. I feel less successful than all of them, but possibly more interesting, my career has been more varied, I've traveled, certainly I'm better read. And now they are planning a girls' night without me, only the chat group is labeled “Girl's night” and maybe it is the misplaced apostrophe that has provoked my antagonism. Which girl gets the night? I don't see much similarity at all between them and my current friend group, where I feel among equals even while I stand in awe of them, I am so lucky to have such smart and interesting friends. It wouldn't occur to me to share an essay or an article with the university girls, really I should just admit that I don’t know them at all, even though I miss them, the friends that they used to be in a forgotten place in my life.

[S]he remembered there'd been times when she'd found the prospect of getting in after her husband totally repugnant, it didn't exactly seem dirty to her, she wouldn't go that far, but it was an indisputable fact that when a person was in the bath the sweat that emerged from their body's pores would mingle with the bathwater, and of course she didn't mind that happening when it was her children's sweat, but when she thought about the sweat from her husband's body mixed in with the bathwater it had struck her as something distasteful, that was to be avoided if at all possible. She didn't want to immerse her body in water that contained all the dirt that had oozed out of his pores along with his sweat, she didn't feel that way when they were having sex and their bodies were pressed so tightly together that their was sweat running down in the gap between their two sets of skins, but when she imagined the dirt and sweat that had come from her husband's pores mixing with the dirt and sweat that had come from her own pores within the bathwater, she found it revolting, as though the contour lines of her own body had dissolved and were blending, through the boundary with another body and the pores in the skin, with something else — and worse, these contaminations taking place while immersed in dirty warm water — which left her feeling unpleasant, and slightly sick.

If in Zambreno's view Kanai's novel is marked by interiors, her protagonist noting details like texture and spatial relationships, very physical, superficial, and domestic, my life might be delineated by exteriors, bounding a certain stasis, wherever I go there I am, confined to a constant aller-retour, my body may scream to travel but I always come back, the universe revolves around this single point of my being, defining in relief the compulsion to get outside of myself. I attended a dance performance last week that revisited the myth of Tantalus, who stood in a pool of water beneath a tree but when he bent to drink the water receded and when he reached for the low-hanging fruit it pulled away; the performer recounted the tale and wondered about staying still, simply not triggering the mechanism (of desire, punishment, capitalism). Yes, I think to myself, rationalizing my life decisions, the trick is to do nothing, then I can't fuck it up.

Excerpt. 
The Paris Review: A Study of Kanai Mieko

Silicone mould of complex 3D object

Woman, closed, or enclosed. Encircling her own body. Pensive, head resting on knee.

I argue in favour of this pose because it's more upright than horizontal (Who has room to keep sculptures of reclining women? Sure, I sculpted a reclining woman, but then I mounted her in an upright position, it's a more effective use of space. Maybe it's me, maybe it has something to do with how tall I am or the space I live in or the precise warp in the lens that is my astigmatism, how I perceive verticality.), and therefore also more fully dimensional, almost a full 360 degrees, not a pose that has a front and no back (like the reclining woman, I had to rely on something other than a visual prompt to complete her back, her backside, the finished piece more a composite than a true depiction of the live model). 

I like that the pose is natural, not contorted. For some reason the art instructor favours extreme torsion, an expression of the artist's torment, she says, but I think it's because she wanted to be a dancer (and failed). Someone else suggests that if I want natural I should look in a mirror; we pay a live model precisely to take advantage of the poses they strike, muscled and flexed. He wants the model to to give him something, show him, inspire him. (But I, I think, am an artist; nothing need be given me, I find it, make something of it, I know where to look, how to look.) 

They want this young Vietnamese woman to embody their classical European sensibilities. Perhaps it was doomed to failure. 

I go big (well, bigger than usual), prep an armature. Determined to complete a full body, not a headless torso.

This model is different from the others, quiet, not a dancer or a circus performer, not body confident. An art student with thick ankles. I sense she is relieved that the agreed-upon pose allows her some modesty.

Suddenly I realize she is all limbs. I am looking at the space she enfolds. How do I sculpt this vast hollow she protects?

It's no longer an artistic question. It's a geometry problem.

I watch how others construct their mould, which planes they choose, which points of access. I don't want to be the first to fail, but I fail to understand how this mould will work.

Red clay woman encased in white silicone. The silicone sheathe around her thighs and buttocks is thin and loose, I had to leave it dry before I could apply another coat. In the meantime, the clay lost water, receded into itself, or gravity pulled the mass of still moist clay flesh away from her shroud.

Plaster shell designed in four parts. (This is the first time I create a mould that is more complex than a front and a back.) It's fragile, in places also too thin (Was a I rushed for time? Did I run out of plaster? Simply, did I lose my touch?), and a thin wedge snaps off, perhaps this small piece is expendable, but the major shell facet breaks in half as I pry it away. 

My blade leaves stab marks along her torso and thighs. I tug at the silicone, and it rips. Repeatedly. 

I fear I cannot save both the clay and the mould. The mould, thin and torn, may not be salvageable. If, on the other had, I preserve the clay, I can attempt another mould. But to repair the clay, I first must release it.

Neck fully broken, likely due to drying conditions, not mishandling. The head hangs on by its nervous system of scavenged electrical wires.

The left big toe comes away with the silicone. Her joints crumble, revealing the metallic understructure. 

The geometry problem becomes a matter of physics: how to remove a large silicone mass from between crossed limbs. I dislocate her left shoulder to release the solid white space that her arm describes beside her waist. 

The silicone can be reassembled, bonded with more silicone. It's messy. And if I choose to reinforce any patches, I risk the plaster shell not fitting snuggly. I think it may be usable, but only once.

I keep the clay moist, but eventually it will dry and crack over its too-robust skeleton, now too big. It would be impossible to remove this armature. (How can I keep the clay from drying and cracking?) I don't know how to add new clay to this old clay that will keep it together rather than pull it apart.

The air is too humid. Nothing will set, nothing will dry.

A pleasure that's hard to describe

They say travel leads to the realization that one does not in fact exist.

So starts an auction lot description of resurfaced possessions and miscellaneous articles. Another lot of Amelia Earhart's belongings in Mariette Lydis's possession describes their encounter. When asked why she flies, Earhart replies, "To get away from myself."

I got away from myself the other weekend, to meet some friends for dinner in Ottawa. My last morning there I sat at a picnic table on the lawn of the admissions building where I went to university. I sat reading Portrait of an Unknown Lady, by Maria Gainza, when a young man asked if he could join me. Easier to roll a joint on the table surface than on a bench, he explained. He asked me about my book, and I told him about it in broad strokes. 

Characters with precisely wrought histories, linear psychologies, and coherent ways of behaving are one of literature's great fallacies. We have little and nothing: only what we are today, at a stretch what we did yesterday, and with luck what we're going to do tomorrow.

The truth is, I haven't particularly enjoyed reading Gainza's novels. I am, however, grateful for what they've opened my eyes to and made me think about.

And it was refreshing to hear this 21-year-old business student say with conviction that art is all about what it makes you feel, it doesn't matter if it's hanging on a gallery wall or valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars — it's personal. 

"It has a certain je ne sais quoi," Enriqueta would say, rubbing her hands together like a squirrel on the way to make mischief. "A pleasure that's hard to describe, no? Wars have been started, and homes broken, and careers ended just for this very feeling."

The book's Spanish title translates as The Black Light, and I think it is more fitting than the title under which it is published in English. The portrait promised to me is incomplete, and it's not clear who the subject is (it could credibly be the narrator herself, her mentor Enriqueta, the presumed forger Renée, or the original artist Mariette Lydis). The black light, though, speaks to the process of investigation and discovery. the process of authentication.

"Can a forgery not give as much pleasure as an original? Isn't there a point when fakes become more authentic than originals? And anyway," she added, "isn't the real scandal the market itself?"

Gainza's narrator issues certificates of authenticity for works of art. Her mentor, who introduced her to the business of art forgery, did not set her on the path to corruption, so much as reveal how far along it she had already gone. 

Regarding the artist: "Her portraits were not always of the prettiest daughter. In fact, she was said to prefer les jolies laides for the kind of poetic license they allowed, never the case with your stereotypical beauties." (A touch of wabi-sabi I can fully get behind.)

Figuras, Mariette Lydis, 1963.

The forger (certainly an artist in her own right): "Yes, she was intelligent, but not that coatrack kind of intelligence for just hanging ideas on; a crazier, more acute kind of intelligence."

We all make our deals with the devil.

This past week I ventured out to watch a kid play all 24 Paganini caprices, and as I marveled at his ease (although the energy required to maintain this composure was betrayed by his popping a string) and wondered at how different the coloration was from that of recordings by other artists I'd listened to at home, I came to the realization that the culture of music (and especially live music) is built on copies (even forgeries). We talk about an original Picasso in a way we would, could, never talk about an original Vivaldi. We may fetishize a particular performance, the market may value a certain pressing of a specific recording, but it's not because it's the original piece of music and all others are copies (though they may pale by comparison).

There's a great scene (among many) in Russian Doll, where 1982 Nadia as Nora walks into Crazy Eddie's and the televisions show a tv within a tv within a tv within... and then an infinite layering of Nadias and Noras.

It's called a video feedback loop. It's like standing in between two mirrors. See, the image is being reflected over and over, and you can't just point at one of the reflections and say "That one's the original." It's like the beginning of mankind.

All of these trains of thought bring me back to my relationship to sculpture.

It took me some years as a professional writer and editor to fully grasp that you have to know the rules before you can break them. I have been slow to appreciate how this extends across artforms. My understanding of music and painting, for example, was naive and underdeveloped such that I thought their magic relied on, well, magic. I thought musical or painterly talent and expression came from one's soul.

So it is with some resistance that I break from "creativity," my hands in the mud, and consider technique. I learned how to create moulds of my sculptures and how to cast them. I didn't see the point, frankly. Why would I want reproductions of my singular art? I had no inclination to disperse copies as Christmas gifts.

The primary purpose of taking a mould, from a cynical standpoint, is to be able to replicate one's clay sculpture in a material like bronze, for which one can charge exorbitant amounts of money.

But. As my stone composite shed its silicone lining, emerged from its plaster shell, a new sculpture was born. I understand now that each copy is its own original. Different pigment. Different mounting. Different material. Different finish. It expresses something different poised atop a traditional marble-like column than it will when I pour it in liquid glass. 

I have learned that a mastery of technique allows artistry to flourish. As any violinist who dares to play Paganini. As any art forger whose work hangs in place of the original.

Gainza's novel blurred together so many different identities, past and present, history and fiction. Mariette Lydis was real. Borges was real. Adolfo Bioy Casares, also real. At the end of the day, most days, I think about making progress in art, and progress in love. I think about fireworks.

They shared a hedonistic kind of love that wasn't passion but something calmer. In their official loves, it was different. 'Progress in love' — according to Wilcock — 'consists of successively finding people who are like gunshots, line cannon blasts, like nitroglycerine cartridges, like torpedoes, like atomic bombs, and, finally, like hydrogen bombs.' Oscar showed up at Montes de Oca one day, and it was fireworks.

A gallery of monsters

If each of us drew our own body as if by dictation from our own internal perspective, we would produce a gallery of monsters!

— from The Sexual Life of Catherine M., by Catherine Millet. 

I'd been planning the third major sculpture for months. (Peter was my first; the second was my tree lady.) I wanted to develop technique. I wanted to stretch beyond what I'd been taught about form. I wanted to create art.

This project had purpose. A self-portrait. I established some objectives.

1. It had to look like me. At least in its early stages. I would allow for it to morph into something more symbolic, expressive, a distortion of me. But its basis had to have sufficient me-ness that I could not deny to myself that it was me.

2. It had to express joy. Pain is easy. It's unique, powerful, exquisite. But Tolstoy was wrong about happiness. Happiness is also nuanced. And it's difficult to express artistically without being saccharine or facile. I needed to preserve something joyous, but I needed to find it first. This was a pandemic project, after all. (I considered some secret joy, some orgasmic expression.)

3. It had to represent me symbolically. It was at this level I thought art manifested. I wanted it to be a self-portrait from the inside out. Maybe my brain spilling out. (What do my migraines look like?) Maybe my head split open and my brain obviously set wrong. Maybe in place of my brain, my heart.

This is what I thought about throughout the summer of 2020. I procured materials, I waited for winter. I broke open the package of clay in early November. It was US election night, I had the tv on, I needed art to counterbalance reality, I wondered if that made my art a political act.

For a few weeks I obsessed over cheekbones, the angle of my nose, the whorls of my ears. And then, quite unexpectedly, I fell in love, or something. I felt both seen and not yet fully seen, and that it didn't matter whether I was seen or not. Suddenly seeing didn't matter, feeling mattered. I thought more about seeing, without actually seeing.

Very coincidentally, I'd started reading John Berger's Ways of Seeing at about that time:

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. [...] 

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

Love didn't last, but I had projects to keep me busy. I kept thinking about how I was seen, how I saw myself. I started seeing outside myself, in a way that I hadn't in a very long time. Among all the ways of seeing, I started seeing my way.

I learned how to handle clay, maintain its wetness. I learned how to work it when it is hard (the work of carving). I learned how to perform a lobotomy. I learned about shapeshifting. I can point to this sculpted portrait's objective faults: the face too flat, the ears too big, the mouth too thin. Too unfocused. Too ambitious. Too inauthentic, even if conceived in an authentic kind of way. 

I studied my perception of myself. I created a very long neck, not because it was realistic or particularly aesthetic. Likely this was a subconscious expression of the distance between my brain and my body.

I failed on all three objectives. (Except maybe the first. And the second and third.) I lacked patience, persistence, and discipline. (But this project served its purpose.)

I am listening to a podcast in which is discussed the drive to create beauty out of pain (and I think: beauty in ugliness and imperfection — wabi-sabi); how Leonard Cohen makes you want to die and spread your legs at the same time; how obsession with a thing is often an obsession with what the thing represents.

I am learning to refocus on form. Art will manifest itself somehow through clarity of thought. I am learning to be naked.

To be naked is to be oneself. [...]

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.

To be naked is to be without disguise. 

This morning, I woke up and looked at it anew, and I smashed it.

Time to start again.

A convulsive act

My adolescence as a reader became, without a break, a long and unhappy apprenticeship as an author.

The geese have returned. They've brought the rains. 

I am living amid a labyrinth of boxes. All my possessions, I am turning them over in my hands, weighing their worth. I like my things.

I am finishing repairs to the unit I will soon vacate while shopping for furniture to fill my new space. I am sick to death of my financial advisor and the notary and the customer service people of half a dozen different services. 

I spend my workday considering how we should talk about the industrial metaverse. I think: this is not reality, this is not my reality. I think: I haven't yet made peace with my profession, because writing isn't a real profession. I think: I resent my mother, my upbringing, for convincing me that pursuing artistic endeavours was nice, but not a way to make a living.

I escape into art. I am in workshop only one evening a week. But I research wire types and gauges for armatures; I make prototypes at home, testing poses, trying techniques; I amass boards and cloths; I buy litres of silicone, preparing to cast molds.

I'm not entirely pleased with my latest sculpture, working from a live female model this time. I don't think I've ever looked at a female body this intently before. The model's function is as an anatomical reference. But she has surgical scars, and acne, and razor burn. We're not supposed to notice these cosmetic details, we're encouraged to whitewash them. But I want to capture the scars, at least. They are vulnerability and strength. This is beauty. A friend tells me about wabi-sabi. (We are all broken.)

I try very hard to see what is, to not let my mind fill in the blanks. (Years of jigsaw puzzling has trained me for this.) I understand something, finally: I will show you what there is before I show you what I see. I must be able to show you what there is, so that you are ready to see when I show you what I see.

I am surprised to find that I am not enjoying books I was certain to like; clever and experimental suddenly don't seem to have sufficient substance to carry the weight of their presumptions. I am returning to modern classics to find depth of character, psychological underpinnings, plot, place in the world.

I have completed 743 days of daily German lessons, yet I find myself drawn to things Italian.

I watch The Great Beauty and The Hand of God, and I marvel at how Sorrentino frames his world, comingling the vulgar and the sublime, all of it beautiful.  

In In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, Elena Ferrante offers a window onto the reading that formed her, as she believes strongly in "the importance of the writing we've inherited."

These essays were conceived as a series of lectures, which were then curtailed by the pandemic. Despite the insights, they are dry. She is a brilliant novelist, and no doubt an accomplished academic, but while her fictions keep me up past my bedtime, these learnings lulled me to sleep. 

Anyone who has literary ambitions knows that the motivations, both great and small, that impel the hand to write come from "real life": the yearning to describe the pain of love, the pain of living, the anguish of death; the need to straighten the world that is all crooked; the search for a new morality that will reshape us; the urgency to give voice to the humble, to strip away power and its atrocities; the need to prophesy disasters but also to design happy worlds.

But importantly, I learn: "Every good character needs an other." I think about that. It helps to take me outside of myself.

I watch The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal's adaptation of Ferrante's novel. It's anxious. The camera so very female, the way it lingers on beautiful men (women too), lusts for their youth. I understand now that there is such a thing as the female gaze, and it's a thing I have, I turn it on others.

So I got in the habit of using traditionally rigid structures and working on them carefully, while I waited patiently to start writing with all the truth I'm capable of, destabilizing, deforming, to make space for myself with my whole body. For me true writing is that: not an elegant, studied gesture but a convulsive act.

Not to fulfill your desires

Sprawled across Jackson Avenue is a larger-than-life lady, screaming her "I don't give a fuck" in chemical pink. We come up on her from behind; a slight torque in her repose, I can't see her hand, between her legs I think, and I feel embarrassed to catch her masturbating in the midday sun. She's monstrous and gorgeous, she looks like an armature barely wrapped in plasticine, but she's all bronze, baby. So this is Queens.

We have a few minutes to pop into the bookstore. It's a comforting place, I want to touch all the books, my hand caresses the shelf, my fingertips drag across the tabletops. I want to read all the books I haven't read, but there isn't time, so I reach for a blind date. "Read me if you like... - intense, complicated sibling rivalries/ - carnivals/ - David Lynch films/ - unreliable narrators."

It's only later that I realize I know what the book is, of course I've read it. (And the receipt confirms my suspicion.) I shouldn't play this game. I've read too many books, I read too much about books, to be blind to them. But in that moment I was happy, I must've already known what it was and I reached for it anyway, this mysterious book made me happy.

I watch The Green Knight again, because it is beautiful and dark and mysterious, and it reminds me that an instant can be a lifetime, and I can wonder for all eternity where it all went wrong, and I can't tell if it actually went wrong at all. This is what I do now, I watch this movie at every opportunity, which seems to be when I fly. Who the hell is this green knight anyway? And this time the image of him picking up his head reminds me of Medusa carrying Perseus's head, but not the bronze, rather the recreation by a live model, the photograph we drew from in art class the other week, that haughty smirk. Now I want to sculpt the green knight, but I can't yet, because I don't understand him. I wonder if cutting off my own head would bring clarity, it is my oppressor after all. (And St Winnifred too, everyone losing their head.)

A friend and I are texting about Ukraine, and she sends me a poem by Bertolt Brecht, because we live in dark times. I read it and I am gutted. (Headless and gutted, empty.)

Not to fulfill your desires but to forget them
Is accounted wise.

I can't tell if Brecht is saying it is wise to forget one's desires, or if it is thought wise but isn't. I spend a weekend in New York fulfilling some desires, yearning after others, and all in all not knowing what to do with them any of them anymore.

I have been reading Ferrante and Starnone, and I will write about them someday. I have been reading other things, and enjoying not writing about them. I am working far too much.

A drunk angry Ukrainian spews profanities on the subway platform and a rat makes for the exit. The poster in the elevator in the hotel reminds me that all my desires are worth fulfilling, even as the world burns. 

Falling out of love is a sort of illness

We always realize things afterwards. Loneliness, for example. It's not when we think we're alone, or when we feel abandoned. That's something different. Loneliness is invisible, we go through it unconsciously, without knowing. At least that's true of the sort I'm talking about. It's a kind of empty set that installs itself in the body, in language, and makes us unintelligible. It appears unexpectedly when we look back, there in a moment we hadn't noticed before.

Empty Set, by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, is an attempt to quantify and order interpersonal associations. A cluster of relationship maps, none of them showing the most effective way through or efficient way around them. They plot out the narrator in relation to men and to her mother — psychoanalysis by way of Venn diagram.

When I first picked up this book, I was at the beginning of something. I am a different person than I was a year ago. I have come into myself, to where I need to be. But I struggle to transform all those experiences into a cohesive narrative. I continue to look for signs, everywhere. I want signposts, directions. 

The last thing he said to me was:

Something broke, I don't know exactly what, but we can't go on together any longer.

He didn't know what had broken?

But (I) needed to find out.

So (I) went back over the sequence of events again and again, cut minutes here and there, and ended up realizing what was obvious: we're constantly drawing something we can never manage to see completely. We only have one side, an edge of our own history, and the rest is hidden.

It turns out we're always at the beginning of things, we just don't know what they're the beginning of. Today is the fist day of the rest of your life. I am at the beginning of my last days in this home. I am at the beginning of another new career phase. I am at the beginning of a difficult stage in my relationship with my mother. I am at the beginning of art. We are also always in the middle of things, and at the end of them too.

Gerber Bicecci narrates a breakup and the start of what might be a new romance against the backdrop of her work. She is painting plywood boards, drawing out their grain, dabbling in dendrochronology. To pay her bills, she is archiving the belongings of a dead woman. 

Tordo(T) is a visual artist, but he would have preferred to be a writer. He used to invent a new name for me every day, as if trying out characters on me. Sometimes he'd also attempt to find some likeness between me and the actresses in the movies we watched together; he always discovered something, some detail. I, on the other hand, wanted to be a visual artist, but visualized almost everything in words. My fellow students at art school used to tell me that was really weird.

(I think of myself as a writer, yet I find myself hopelessly inarticulate and am considering the possibility that I express myself better through sculpture. I am considering the possibility that I've spent most of my life thinking I was one kind of artist, while in fact I am another kind entirely. Someone suggested to me I could be both. I'm not sure I agree. Sure, I can do both, but I can be only the one thing that I truly am. These days I am writing about sculpture. I am writing a series of artist statements for sculptures I may never create.)

Her absent mother is ever-present as she traces time.

To forget someone, you have to be extremely methodical. Falling out of love is a sort of illness that can only be fought off with routine. This hadn't occurred to me before — it was my survival instinct that discovered it. So I started searching for activities and time-tabling them. Spend the whole morning lying facedown on the huge plywood board, following the line of a grain with a brush dipped in black, white, or gray. Two or three grain lines a day, no more. A fourth, and my hand would begin to tremble and overstep the mark. Sometimes had to use an ultrafine brush, sometimes a thicker one. It was, above all, an exercise in patience.

Patience. We are always at the beginning of something. 

I quite love this novel. I don't really know what it is, and that's part of the joy I take in it. It is not merely a novel about art; it's in conversation with art. It's a non-empty set — the intersection of novel and painting.

In fact I did feel something, something strange. Not jealousy, just a sensation of disappearing; my body was becoming transparent. I didn't exist there, because in that place, I definitively did not exist. And in fact that wasn't a problem, because I didn't want to exist there, what bothered me was not being able to exist anywhere.

See also|
Verónica Gerber Bicecci and the language to come
The rabbit hole that is Verónica Gerber Bicecci's website 

Einsehen

If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep looking until his own center starts to sink with the stony weight of the rock forming inside him, too. It is a kind of perception that takes place within the body, and it requires the observer to be both the seer and the seen. To observe with empathy, one sees not only with the eyes but with the skin.

— from You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, by Rachel Corbett (quoted in brainpickings). 

Me in awe of L'Age d'airain, Musée Rodin, 1991.

When I was 15, my big sister took me to Montreal for a few days. I live here now, but that was my first real exposure to the city. The details of the trip escape me. I remember drinking milky coffee from a bowl at a sidewalk café. I remember a visit to the museum: a sculpture on a pedestal, many figures intertwined, and I caressed it, at which point a looming security guard intervened. I don't remember what the sculpture looked like; I remember what it felt like.

I should have known then, recognized the draw of sculpture, the tactility of it. The best sculpture, in my view, is the kind that makes you want to touch it.

I lived in Ottawa for a time, and many a day, when sad or bored or simply free, I would stop by the National Gallery. I would gaze at the sun over Monet's Waterloo Bridge and then puzzle over one of Francis Bacon's popes. As I made my way from one to the other, I would slip past a Giacometti at the side of the hall, or it would slip past me. It might stop me in my tracks. I might take a few steps backwards, forward again, back, trying to pinpoint the exact coordinates where it switched from three dimensions to two, like a child manipulating a holographic postcard, to find where the planes of art and science were in precise alignment with humour and passion. The Giacometti would near disappear, just a line dimension containing multitudes, and unfurling in an instant. And this too manifested tactility, I needed to touch it, to grasp that it was there.

I have been to Paris several times, but I have never been to the Louvre. Given a free afternoon, I go to the Musée Rodin.

That first time I went to Paris, it was 52 hours from touchdown to liftoff, and several of those precious hours would be spent standing in awe of muscular bronze works. I'd seen Camille Claudel. (I bought a volume of Paul Claudel's poetry at a stall along the Seine.)

Despite my love of his work, most everything I know about Rodin I know via Rainer Maria Rilke's letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé, when he served as Rodin's personal secretary, and I share his respect for Rodin's ability to materialize his inner mind.

I watched a documentary about Rodin recently and was stunned to realize he'd been rejected, that his career started late, that he was obsessive.

I am coming to understand the physicality of Rodin's work. I am coming to understand why I think it matters. I am learning the art of einsehen, inseeing. I am starting to see something in myself.

I look back at photos I have taken while traveling. Sculptures everywhere, Warsaw, Rome, Barcelona, Prague. Old, obscure, under restoration, often plain weird. From Botero's cat to Černý's babies.

I am learning how to make plaster moulds. I am learning how to see the shape of white space, how to see in relief. We are defined by absence as much as by presence.

Unquenched and wild longing

Άδάμας (Unconquerable), by Sophia Wallace, 2013.

Desire, for women, can be complicated. While men are generally allowed to want openly, to covet pleasure openly, women have to be more discreet about our desires. We can be wanted but we are rarely allowed to want because if we want — if we crave — we are greedy, we are wanton, we are fallen, we are whores. If we want, we acknowledge that we yearn to be satisfied. We acknowledge that our satisfaction matters. We demand to be seen and heard.

I am interested in the silence and strictures around women's desire, how we seem to have decided, as a culture, that there is shame in wanting and believing we deserve to want. We seem to have decided that we must earn the right to want and be temperate when we dare to do so. If you must want, don't dare want too much. We can't even have a serious conversation about desire. There is always some pithy parlance framing desire as if to want means you are not just desirous and human, you are needy, desperate. These days, when we talk about want, we talk about thirst, about unquenched and wild longing. When someone is too open about their desires, they are mocked for the audacity of being thirsty, parched. If they aren't mocked, they are condescended to with rhetoric about empowerment. Look at that woman expressing her desires? Look how bold and brave she is.

The sad truth is that women who express their desires unabashedly are brave.

— from "What It Means to Want" [foreword], by Roxane Gay in A Woman's Right to Pleasure.

This book, published in partnership with Lelo (producer of the best vibrator ever) is an amazing collection of art and writings about art and pleasure. Yet, I feel I need to hide the fact that I'm reading it. We have so far to go. I have so far to go. Be brave.

Condemned to a dream of romantic love

The fragrance in the room has four hearts. None of these hearts is human, and that's why I'm drawn towards them. At the base of this fragrance is soil and oakmoss, incense, and the smell of an insect captured in amber. A brown scent. Pungent and abiding. It can remain on the skin, in the nostrils, for up to a week. I know the smell of oakmoss, because you've planted it inside me, just as you've planted the idea that I should love one man only, be loyal to one man only, and that I should allow myself to be courted. All of us here are condemned to a dream of romantic love, even though no one I know loves in that way, or lives that kind of a life. Yet these are the dreams you've given us. I know the smell of oakmoss, but I don't know what it feels like to the touch. Still, my hand bears the faint perception of me standing at the edge of a wood and staring out at the sea as my palm smoothes this moss on the trunk of the oak. Tell me, did you plant this perception in me? Is it a part of the programme? Or did the image come up from inside me, of its own accord?

— from "Statement 011" in The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, by Olga Ravn.

This book is a work of art. It opens with a note of gratitude for the sculptures and installations of Lea Guldditte Hestelund. I reconsider what it is I want to sculpt. I redouble my efforts to procure marble scraps. I reconsider what it is I want to write.

The first lump of clay: Peter

Trust your hands. Your fingers know things. You have touched faces. You have touched children and lovers. Your fingers remember.

That was the first lesson. The first lesson is always one of trust.

After that came geometry. Twenty pounds of grey were divided to became a sphere on a slab.

Wet, smooth, messy. Returning to childhood, to earth. Primal, satisfying.

We entered a Stone Age and learned to use tools.

Anatomy. Musculature. Proportion.

(Ears are like fingerprints, and they're a bitch to sculpt.)

Think of who they are, where they come from, what their purpose is.

That was the second lesson. Every object has a story.

Peter. He's German, 50-ish, works a soul-killing administrative job. Failed poet. When he was young he fell out of a tree and broke his nose. Every poem he's ever written has been about that tree.

One woman wanted to craft a bust of an African woman basking in the sun. Another was using a photo as her guide, her boyfriend when he was little. Ah. Backstory. 

The writer in me had given this way too much thought, but my sculptor self is grateful for the detail. Character is born of detail.

Peter was abandoned at the arts centre when lockdown was first decreed over a year ago, still wanting a touch up of epoxy, and a coat of matte to reduce the shine. I was finally able to retrieve him, and another work in progress, by special appointment. 

He sits now, at home, in this eternal state of near completion, witnessing my poetic failings, my struggles with trust and love.

My living space has given way to art studio. Art is solace and meditation. Clay is the vessel, my fingers are god. 

The distance of art

I considered the possibility that art — not just L's art but the whole notion of art — might itself be a serpent, whispering in our ears, sapping away all our satisfaction and our belief in the things of this world with the idea that there was something higher and better within us which could be equalled by what was right in front of us. The distance of art suddenly felt like nothing but the distance in myself, the coldest, loneliest distance in the world from true love and belonging.

Second Place, by  Rachel Cusk, is a book I like more now in hindsight than I did while reading it. The story is uncomfortable and frustrating, with unlikeable characters and unclear motivations. Too much like real life, perhaps, for me to see its artfulness up close.

Some people write simply because they don't know how to live in the moment, I said, and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.

[This describes my relationship to living, and moments, and writing and reading, quite accurately.]

The narrator, M, a writer of books that no one seems to have much regard for, hosts something like an artist's retreat, wherein the artist is obliged for her hospitality and she can leech off their creativity. M's voice is very much like Faye's, the writer in the Outline Trilogy, but here's the thing: I don't much like M. I get the feeling nobody does. Faye, however, wasn't much more than an outline, given shape by the stories of the people surrounding her. M has more solidity — filled in, but with dark unpleasantness.

So M invites this artist, L, to stay; she's in love with L, or his art, or both, it's hard to tell. After a long while L finally agrees to come, but he brings a woman with him, which M clearly didn't bargain for, and there's less artistic inspiration about the visit than financial desperation — L is out of style and down on his luck.

What interested him was his suspicion not that he might have missed out on something, but that he had failed entirely to see something else, something that had ultimately to do with reality and with a definition of reality as a place where he himself did not exist.

M is genuine in her regard for L's art and her wish to commune with him, to understand his vision and and process.

It took L's painting to make me really see it. I saw, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state, which had never truly been revealed to me before.

She feels failed, and frustrated, and aging. (But maybe I'm projecting.) She doesn't feel valued, as an artist or a patron. (But maybe I'm projecting.) She believes that the truth is an absolute thing that exists outside of us, and it is art's purpose to capture it.

I am interested in the existence of things before our knowledge of them — partly because I have trouble believing that they do exist! If you have always been criticised, from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in the time or space before the criticism was made: to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist. The criticism is more real than you are: it seems, in fact, to have created you. I believe a lot of people walk around with this problem in their heads, and it leads to all kinds of trouble – in my case, it led to my body and my mind getting divorced from each other right at the start, when I was only a few years old. But my point is that there’s something that paintings and other created objects can do to give you some relief. They give you a location, a place to be, when the rest of the time the space has been taken up because the criticism got there first. I don’t include things created out of words, though: at least for me they don’t have the same effect, because they have to pass through my mind to get to me. My appreciation of words has to be mental. 

She rages at L's dismissal of her. She's clearly had to struggle to be a mother and an artist, simply to be a woman in a body and with an aspiration. L, of course, embodies male white privilege.

Things go wrong, and then they go wrong again, and again, and somewhere in the middle of it art happens and we're somewhat in awe of it even though it bites, it's terrifying, maybe this is some kind of truth. And most of us come out of it as better people.

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward — or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal — or can be.

[The whole story is addressed to someone named Jeffers. This is a reference to a 1930s memoir of an arts patron who wrote about DH Lawrence's stay at her colony. If you don't know the story, then the construct of Jeffers doesn't make sense — it's unnecessary and an unfortunate distraction.]

The human capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our souls. Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later. My difficulty, I saw then, had always lain in finding a way to give back all the impressions I had received, to render an account to a god who had never come and never come, despite my desire to surrender everything that was inside me. Yet even so my receptive faculty had not, for some reason, failed me: I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator.

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.