The price of experience is life's great sorrows

It is a fact, though, that for some time now I have known about life. As for love, on that score there is not only no illusion left in me, but also no desire for illusions, no urge to try to make these things last which are only sweet and good because they are ephemeral . . . But then, this kind of thing is so personal, so much my problem, that it is impossible to explain it clearly, let alone to make anyone else understand me. The price of experience is life's great sorrows, but it cannot be shared.

One book inevitably leads to another. Maggie Nelson in Bluets dreams of being subsumed into a tribe of blue people, years before learning of the Tuareg (those "abandoned by God"). Nelson cites Isabelle Eberhardt: "Long and white, the road twists like a snake toward the far-off blue places, toward the bright edges of the earth."

[I recall the startlingly infinite blue of the eyes of Brahim, and occasional strangers, in a desert town in Tunisia. I remember believing they had a secret knowledge, like Fremen. Years later, lying on the dunes at the eastern edge of Morocco, I learned the desert is an ocean. Dig down, water everywhere. I'm rocked to sleep on the undulating sand, the sound of the wind through the dunes like crashing waves. Their eyes an ocean.]

An almost cold wind blew through the night, and in the dunes a murmur like that of the sea.

I was less interested in Isabelle Eberhardt's writing than in the myth of her. I realize now I might better understand her through the words she used to articulate her artistic vision. I settled instead for her tired jottings, curated and annotated by an editor with a different focus than mine. The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt, features selections from four notebooks, beginning January 1, 1900. The final entry is January 31, 1903. She wrote mainly in French, with occasional passages in Russian (her mother's tongue) and Arabic (a language of spiritual interest). In October 1904, she was killed in a flash flood in Aïn Séfra, Algeria.

She was educated. She published short stories under a male pseudonym. She dressed as a man. She was anti-colonialist and traveled across North Africa. She was a mystic and converted to Islam, joining a Sufi sect. She was attacked by a man who may have been a hired assassin. She had lovers. She was unbearably sad.

Apart from all (well, most) of these things, she reminds me of myself. "Even I, as someone intimately convinced that I do not know how to live." She tortured herself with becoming a better version of herself.

Seen from the outside, I wear the mask of the cynic, the dissipated and debauched layabout. No one yet has managed to see through to my real inner self, which is sensitive and pure and which rises above the humiliation and baseness I choose to wallow in. No one has ever understood that even though I may seem to be driven by the senses alone, my heart is in fact generous.

The journals give themselves over to mundane concerns: finances and the logistics of travel and lodging. She grapples with artistic insecurities. She confesses that she is often so preoccupied with the day-to-day that she has neither time nor inspiration for her writing.

While the diaries document a unique life, they don't really stand up on their own. They don't always provide sufficient biographical detail for me to understand what was at issue. What insight it offers into her character, her artistic process, is mostly meaningless without being familiar with her output. I shall have to seek out The Oblivions Seekers someday.

How could I have believed in the mysteriousness that I thought I sensed in this country, which was only  a reflection of the sad enigma of my own soul? I am condemned to carry my unnameable sorrow, this whole world of thought along with me like this, wherever I go, through the countries and cities of the earth, without ever finding the Icaria of my dreams!

I am as ignorant about myself as I am about the outside world. Perhaps that is the only truth.

The Paris Review: Feminize Your Canon: Isabelle Eberhardt

Close-packed human chaos

Writing, I'm convinced, is often nothing but revenge — a way of twirling one's mustache, donning buckler and sword and feathery hat, shaking one's gauntleted fist at the gods.

I thought I could use some laughter in dark times; Geoff Dyer's recommendations of funny books came just when needed. He reminded me that I've been meaning to read Eve Babitz, but of all the books he listed, the library had only Terry Castle.

I got off to a rocky start with The Professor and Other Writings. This collection of essays opens with a piece on World War I, which I found neither funny nor particularly interesting, so I was a little wary of what I'd gotten myself into.

While I wouldn't call these essays funny exactly (certainly not in an uproariously side-splitting way), Castle certainly knows how to tell a story.

There's a piece on Susan Sontag, about whom I know shamefully little, and pieces about Agnes Martin and Art Pepper, about whom I'd known nothing at all (and now want to know more).

I realize there may be a few lost souls who've never heard of him. Forget the overrated (and vapid-looking) Chet Baker. Art Pepper (1925-1982) was an authentic American genius. One of the supreme alto saxophone players of all time, Charlie Parker included. A deliriously handsome lover boy in the glory days of his youth. A lifelong dope addict of truly Satanic fuck-it-all grandeur. A natural writer of brazen, comic, commanding virtuosity. A proud long-term denizen of the California prison system. And now, no doubt, a tranquil if desiccated corpse.

In "Home Alone," Castle shares her "shelter mag obsession" and highlights how the industry was traumatized by 9/11, when the idea of "home" was attacked and our sense of "sanctuary" threatened. She later turns a bit morbid considering the furnishings of death and evokes the avian-flu epidemic of 1918-19, noting that bird-to-human influenza viruses were much in the news at the time of writing in 2006. It was somewhat eerie to be reading this against the backdrop of quarantine. In 2020, with virus on all the airwaves, home is our only safespace — it is our office and our entertainment and it circumscribes our whole life. Remind me to check out a home decor magazine next time I pass the newsstand.

Ostensibly the star of the show, is "The Professor," about Castle's relationship with a teacher when she was in grad school. Perhaps because this essay is the longest and most personal, my feelings toward it are ambivalent. It's got some great lines: "Cathy and Heathcliff were like old acquaintances — my weird second cousins or something." But it is also self-indulgent — Castle's old journals are a springboard to the 70s, an emotionally juvenile time. The drama of the affair feels out of proportion, despite the morally questionable behaviour (a student-teacher relationship of this sort today might be judged much more harshly).

Castle's lesbianism is a constant presence, and if not central, then certainly significant to some stories. It made me wonder to what extent is my sexuality present in my writing, even when not the subject of it. Castle's references throughout to therapy also has me reconsidering whether I should give psychotherapy another try. (Why should I? What is it that fascinates me? Why do I feel I'm not good at it? Why do some people get so much from it, and why can't I be one of them?)

All in all, this is the kind of book I'd prefer to have in print, to pick up and browse at my leisure. A bookful of Castle is a lot of Castle. Were this not a library book with a due date, I'd've approached it differently. I'd rather take an essay at a time now and then.

Sometimes in raucous old bebop recordings from the late forties — the grotty straight-ahead bootleg ones with murky nightclub sound, people talking and glasses clinking in the background — the music doesn't end properly, with the usual reprise and nail-it-down final chord. It just breaks off abruptly in the middle of a solo or chorus as if someone had knocked over the mike. You're left with the sense of a close-packed human chaos, now terminated. Art Pepper is a kind of mannequin or decoy, I guess, the sort of mummified icon that even a person as terrified by mortality and other people as I am can latch onto and worship. It's true: I love his deftness and valor and craziness, and the exorbitant beauty of his playing. I love the quick, creamy sound he gets out of his alto. I love his shame-free storytelling. I love his handsome young male face.

Erotic energy is everywhere

We think erotic energy is everywhere — in the deep breath that fills our lungs as we step out into a warm spring morning, in the cold water spilling over the rocks in a brook, in the creativity that drives us to paint pictures and tell stories and make music and write books, in the loving tenderness we feel toward our friends and relatives and children.

So here's a book a friend suggested I read: The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures, by Dossie Easton and Janet W Hardy. And it's hard not to wonder what the underlying message might be as he presses it into my hands: Am I not ethical enough? Or not slutty enough?

Is this or is this not a book about sluttery? (I love that word, "sluttery.")

"Polyamory" is relatively new word in many people's vocabulary. It's hard not to think of polyamory as a mere trend. Many practitioners would argue that it's been around forever, simply not talked about openly. This is the evolution; it is becoming socially acceptable. The Ethical Slut is not capitalizing on this social phenomenon. Originally published in 1997, it's considered groundbreaking in raising awareness and has helped many people achieve sexual fulfilment. (Your mileage may vary.)

Definitely there are several ideas put forward in this book that I can readily get behind. For example, "Sexual energy pervades everything all the time; we inhale it into our lungs and exude it from our pores."

That there are various kinds of love. That there are various kinds of relationships. That no one person can satisfy our everything (this is why I have book friends, and work friends, and art gallery friends, etc.). That our capacity for love is infinite — we will never run out of love to give.

If the title piques your interest, you may want out check out this YouTube review. It's more a low-key stream-of-consciousness rant than it is a proper review (he makes a big deal of society holding a double standard for judging the behaviour of men and women, which is a tangential point in the book), but he uses the book as a springboard to discuss many of the issues implicit to polyamory and sluttery. The book itself is something of a practical guide, in general terms.

(I'd really like a book to tell me if it's OK to spontaneously sext a married man at midnight, even though most of our texts are relegated to weekday afternoons and limited to establishing meeting points. But I guess that's something I'll have to figure out with my lover.)

The opening chapters are given over to examining traditional ideas that may be founded in outdated systems (religious, legal, etc.). Several exercises are suggested (for example, make a list of all the reasons someone might want to be a slut and consider the validity of those reasons). The book goes on to describe the several different nontraditional kinds of relationships. In a very general way, the book covers everything from consent and safe sex to how to meet like-minded people for initial explorations.

But the bulk of the text is about communicating within a relationship, and would slip neatly into any relationship self-help book (the kind of book I would never read).

A few things in this book rankled my editorial sensibilities: For example, one author refers to the early years of feminism, but I'm fairly certain she's no suffragette — she means the 60s. And despite proclaiming that there's no one-size-fits-all polyamory, the authors clearly have their own worldview biases (that is, I didn't find any insight into what it means to be a single polyamorist; the predominant view is that of someone who is coupled, albeit multiply in various combinations).

The authors clearly state that jealousy is not an emotion, describing it as an umbrella that encompasses anger, sadness, etc., but on the very next page they refer to jealousy as an emotion. Now, I know what they mean, and the book has a chatty enough tone that it's easy to assume an understanding, but when such a great part of this book is given over to communication, it's a shame that they should get sloppy over defining terms.

The primary focus of the book is the value of communication in any relationship, and it's full of other good things like self-awareness, healthy body image, and overall sex positivity.

I'm not sure who this book is for, though. I don't think it will overturn the life-long beliefs and prejudices of close-minded people. As for the relatively open-minded, there is nothing new here. I suppose there's a small demographic who find reassurance in a book that gives them the vocabulary to talk about their lifestyle, new labels by which to define themselves.

So I'm here to proclaim that I'm a slut. And I try to be ethical about it.

I've never confessed anything

This summer, a girlfriend asked me in hushed tones if I knew what squirting was, and do I squirt. I didn't know, and I don't (not yet, anyway).

Here's an irony: (almost) everything I know about squirting I've learned from men. I don't know one woman who squirts, but then, I haven't asked all my female friends — it's not a socially comfortable question.

And that pisses me off, like it's men's secret knowledge, in their control. It pisses me off because I'm already pressured to be the perfect lover with the perfect body and have orgasms the way they're portrayed in porn (I don't watch porn, I suspect I'm still not doing it right), and now I'm supposed to squirt too.

So Sexographies, by Gabriela Wiener, is wow. She writes about squirting.

She also writes about polygyny, dominatrix techniques, swinger clubs, Isabel Allende, egg donation, and ayahuasca. I want to go drinking with her.

This essay collection has the distinction of being one of the few books whereupon having read a review of it, I rushed out to get myself a copy.

Wiener writes from first-hand experience. You may call her adventurous, a bit of risk-taker. But she's also aware and reflective. [I wish I had the guts to live the life required to write this book.] She takes ayahuasca, she submits to a dominatrix, she lives (for a couple weeks) with a sex guru and his six wives, she finds someone to make her squirt.

In an essay on body image, she writes:

If my lovers or friends are ugly, I think they make me uglier by association. The same goes for what I write. What I write always makes me uglier. I won't go into my hatred for good writers who are also marvelously hot. I've got several of them buried in my backyard. Beauty kills, no? For Bataille, "Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.... The greater the beauty, the more it is befouled.

[What do I think is beautiful? What am I attracted to? How do I profane it? How am I profaned?]

I love that Wiener namechecks Bataille, Bolaño, Emmanuel Carrère. I was surprised to so thoroughly enjoy reading about Isabel Allende. Once upon a time I loved her books, but I grew out of them. Allende is a popstar, somewhat disparaged in literary circles. But Wiener reminds us that her books are valuable: "Her books reveal history through memory and reclaim sex so that it belongs to the home and not to poets of the body." Her work is belittled for being domestic. Thank god, at least she is popular.

Allende once said, "I learned how to be feminine, sexy, and a feminist. It can be done." Maybe not every woman wants to be all three; but a woman should be able to be whatever the fuck she wants. Perhaps Wiener sees in herself some of the same qualities Allende wields — Allende played the lead role in her "adventure-reportages," a feminist gonzo journalist ahead of her time.

Wiener inserts herself into all her stories. This is her strength. This is where authenticity comes from. She does not write about a subject; she writes about her relationship to a subject. [I like to think I write the same way.]

We need to write with frankness, without excuses. We need to say, this is what matters (and this, and this, no matter how silly or small, this can matter too), this is what it means to be alive.

It's Wiener's essay on motherhood that gutted me, brought me to tears. I read this entire collection of essays against the backdrop of the senate committee hearing regarding Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the US Supreme Court. My reality was a little more ghastly thanks to this juxtaposition. How hard it is for a woman to be frank, particularly regarding sexual matters, where men still have so much power — it's men who shape the truth and the law and the value of sex.

We stress over raising our girls right, to be confident and assertive of their rights and to be whoever they need to be. The world might be a better place if we agonized half so much over how we raise our boys.

My daughter is an intelligent girl, she learns new things every day; she draws portraits of Chinese emperors, she writes three-line novels, and she also just became a fan of Elvis.

Sometimes people ask me if I'm scared of her reading the things that I've published, the things I've "confessed."

I've never confessed anything. There's something perverse in the word "confession." Within it lives the word "guilt." I usually reply that I'm not afraid because I know my daughter knows the value of truth.

Reviews

Asymptote
LARB: I Never Got the Knack of Fidelity: On Gabriela Wiener’s “Crónicas”
L'Officiel USA: "self-taught chronicler of intimacy and sexuality"
On the Sea Wall
Underrated Reads

Excerpts
#Noespis (in Spanish)
The Greater the Beauty, the More It Is Befouled
Three
Isabel Allende Will Keep Writing from the Afterlife
On Motherliness
From This Side and from That Side

Related
For a discussion of how do we square sexual fulfillment and freedom from unwanted sexual advances, see Why We Need Erotica (framed around a review of Pauline Réage's Story of O), which says so well what I want to say.

When we ignore or demean consensual BDSM erotica, or stories about female sexual submission, we inadvertently contribute to a cultural legacy that routinely pathologizes, demeans, or erases women’s sexual desires.

This is why you should read Gabriela Wiener. This is why women should talk about squirting.

Until we are brave enough to investigate it [female sexuality] unflinchingly — without turning it into a pathology, without pitting it against feminist movements — women will not be able to achieve sexual liberation.

Remember to breathe

A friend of mine, male, broached the subject of practicing Tantra with me and recommended The Heart of Tantric Sex, by Diana Richardson, as a practical, no-nonsense approach.

I think few people would dismiss the concept of tantra, whether in sex or more generally in life — it calls for more awareness, a reorientation of focus on the journey as opposed to the destination.

[Indeed, the idea of tantra has interested me ever since I encountered something like it at too young an age in Trevanian's Shibumi, in which a couple make a game of attaining orgasm without touching.]

As with all things, so much of what you get out of something depends on the attitude you have going into it. I am a sceptic of what I call "yoga-speak," and I found many passages laughable:

Remember to breathe! Breathe deeply and slowly. When you really get the knack of enjoying breathing, it becomes absolutely divine.

Breath is life-enhancing. Deep breathing massages the sex centre. It activates your sex energy. "However you decide to play with the breath, make it creative and interesting for yourself." When you make love, breath may actually stop momentarily, but don't worry — "the breathing will start up again of its own accord."

A more troubling aspect of yoga-speak is how it confounds the biological heart with its metaphorical sense. Similarly, words like "center" and "polarity" are used but they have no precise definition, let alone a scientific basis. The book is not scientific at all, but sometimes it pretends to be.

This is potentially dangerous.

While I believe in the conservation of energy, and I believe mind has some effect over matter, one should not exclude scientific fact.

For example,

Most women are not aware of this, but after years of heavy sex and forced orgasm, the ovaries and lower belly area become very congested and tense. This begins to disturb the health of a woman and she may find herself having repeated vaginal infections, irritations, or discharges, and it may even affect her urinary system. The breasts, which are not understood in terms of polarity, also begin to get diseases. Her hormones and menstrual cycle are affected too, thus her whole personality is influenced. The effects of these emotions are devastating and can leave a woman and her partners exhausted and confused for days.

Also,

While menstruating, it is recommended that the woman assume a position on top of the man to support the menstrual flow by not reversing it, which can have congesting effects. […] A conventional orgasm is known to dispel the tensions of menstrual pain, but this is only a short-term measure as the pain is often a reflection of gathered sexual tensions.

No one should ever dismiss pain as a blockage of energy. Pain, infections, et cetera can be signs of serious underlying medical conditions. While you should feel free to explore sex and its contribution to your overall well-being, sex won't cure everything — for this there are medications and other treatments.

Similarly, emotional behaviours may be a sign of mental illness that merits treatment beyond adjusting one's approach to sex.

Tantra teaches us that the emotional qualities that a man finds most disturbing in a woman are something that he himself actually creates through his insistence on excitement and orgasm. A woman is kept at the lowest level of her sexual expression and obstructed from fulfilling her true female potential. For centuries she had been used as a sexual object, the source of men's gratification. This saddens and enrages her. Over time her untapped divine energies become increasingly dormant and stagnant, while a deep dissatisfaction, disappointment, and lack of love pervades every cell in her body, making her emotionally unstable. Conventional sex, hot, frenzied, and focused on self-gratification, whips up these emotions within, and this triggers sexual excitement, interfering with her ability to be receptive.

I found myself feeling sorry for the author. She seems to harbour a lot of emotional pain and resentment regarding her early, formative sexual experiences. The advice and techniques presented in this book are very common-sensical. Maybe I have a naturally tantric disposition, but I think most women on their journey toward sexual fulfilment organically come to the conclusions this book offers. (Gosh, I hope most women are sexually fulfilled!)

The sex that is promoted is very much geared toward female pleasure. Richardson reminds us that the harder you try to achieve something (orgasm), often the more elusive it becomes. Relaxation is key.

There is a great deal of pleasure to be had in relaxing into sex energy, to luxuriate in being as opposed to doing. However, I don't buy the implied case this book is making that sexual tension is bad, sexual excitement is bad, and the pursuit of the orgasm is some patriarchal conspiracy perpetuated by the porn industry. I don't understand what's wrong with conventional sex.

To bring another layer of skepticism to my reading, Richardson is a disciple of Osho (her bibliography consists of mostly his books), who is steeped in controversy regarding everything from tax evasion to bioterrorism.

Some people may benefit from this book, and it's worth reminding ourselves to relax, enjoy the journey, etc., but I found it simple and misguided, if well intentioned.

Awareness enhances everything in life. I have found this to be especially true of sex — awareness of not only what you like but why like it.

Go to a park and look at a tree. Don't just glance at it, really look. Appreciate the leaves, the green, the aliveness. Now close your eyes and relax for a while. When you open them again, imagine that you are no longer looking at the tree but the tree is looking at you, and invite it into you, through your eyes. See how deeply you can allow the green livingness to enter you. Absorb it into the cells of your body. Then try it with the open blue sky, a puffy cloud, a glorious sunset. Allow yourself to be seen and penetrated by nature. Notice how this practice intensifies your awareness, dissolves your boundaries, increases your sense of connectedness to the rest of the world.

Perhaps I am lucky to already feel a great sense of connectedness with the world.

The feeling of only half understanding

While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for?

Batuman is a joy to read. She's funny, smart, and sincere. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman, takes the reader from Stanford to Samarkand by way of Russia.

A familiarity with Russian literature is not required to appreciate this memoir, though if you understand the mindset of what it is to revel in these thick and intricate Russian worlds, so much the better.

However, for example, I've never read Babel, to whom the whole of chapter one is devoted; but I think I might want to read Babel now ("Whenever Babel meets anyone, he has to fathom what he is. Always "what," not "who."). I have no knowledge of the Uzbek language or its literature, and I'm quite convinced that it's not necessary for me to pursue the topic further. So I guess what you need to bring to this book is an openness to hearing the stories of people who pursue literature, and its more obscure aspects, as a field of study.

(The scholars seem to agree that Babel lived life as a source of material. I suppose a lot or writers are "guilty" of this.)

I became aware of a deep flaw in my understanding of the world and human knowledge. I had previously thought of knowledge as a network of connections that somehow preserved and safeguarded the memory of what they were connecting. But of course it was only people who remembered things; words and ideas themselves had no memory. The Uzbek language truly was related to both Turkish and Russian, by either genetic origin or secondary contact... but that didn't make it a reconciliation between the two. When you studied Uzbek, you weren't learning a history or a story; all you were learning was a collection of words. And the larger implication was that no geographic location, no foreign language, no pre-existing entity at all would ever reconcile "who" you were with "what" you were, or where you came from with what you liked.

What may not be obvious about The Possessed, even though Batuman states it clearly, more than once, is that it's about love. The state of being possessed has love at its core. "What is it you love, when you're in love?" This is difficult enough to answer when the object of love is a person — their body, their soul, their attributes, their worldly goods. But when love's target is more abstract, so too are its defining characteristics. What do you love when you love a language or a literature or a body of work?

Batuman exposes some of the tedium and absurdity of academia. But through it all there is love and joy!

When I came back from Samarkand, I almost entirely lost the ability to read poetry. It was like a language I didn't speak anymore. What I used to enjoy in poetry was precisely the feeling of only half understanding — a feeling that is intensified, as Tolstoy once observed, when the poetry is written in a foreign language:

Without entering into the meaning of each phrase you continue to read and, from the few words that are comprehensible to you, a completely different meaning arises in your mind — unclear, cloudy, and not in accord with the original phrasing, but all the more beautiful and poetic. For a long time, the Caucasus was for me this poem in a foreign language; once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented, and many cases in which I believed the real poem was better than the imaginary one.

After Samarkand, the beauty of cloudy, poetical meanings conjured out of associations and half-grasped words — the beauty of things that don't appear on the page — somehow lost its charm for me. From that point on I was interested only in huge novels. I started researching a dissertation on the hugeness of novels, the way they devour time and material. And although I suppose it's just coincidence that Tolstoy compared the subjective charms of half-understood poetry to the Caucasus in particular, nonetheless, I was finished with them, too — with the Caucasus, the Russian East, and the literatures of the peripheries.

Meanwhile, I have lost the ability to read fiction, I hope only temporarily. Between salving my heart, confessing my soul to paper, and walking — the endless walking — fiction has become an interference, reading an irritation. Sigh.

Excerpt.

Review: Salon

The fact that I could never quite understand what was going on put me off of Russian novels; for Batuman, it's a prime attraction.

The war and the revolution are inseparable

I have no particular love for the idealized "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.

I read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia on my return from Barcelona. I would've liked to read it beforehand, but I realize that no matter how much time I would have given myself to process Orwell's explanations, I would be no closer to understanding the politics of that time and place. He admits that he didn't understand it himself. "The war and the revolution are inseparable," he writes, and that is as much clarity as one can hope for.

The book recounts Orwell's experience fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War. While the politics is confusing, the account of his time in Spain — of life in the trenches, of hospital condition near the front line, of being shot at and being shot, of being under surveillance — is starkly vivid and insightful. It's also often funny, even in grim circumstances.

The days grew hotter and even the nights grew tolerably warm. On a bullet-chipped tree in front of our parapet thick clusters of cherries were forming. Bathing in the river ceased to be an agony and became almost a pleasure. Wild roses with pink blooms the size of saucers straggled over the shell-holes round Torre Fabián. Behind the line you met peasants wearing wild roses over their ears. In the evening they used to go out with green nets, hunting quails. You spread the net over the tops of the grasses and then lay down and made a noise like a female quail. Any male quail that was within hearing then came running towards you, and when he was underneath the net you threw a stone to scare him, whereupon he sprang into the air and was entangled in the net. Apparently only male quails were caught, which struck me as unfair.

I suspect Orwell's text if read deeply would shed light on current Catalonian struggles for independence.

It's interesting to note, also, how Orwell's experience must've informed Nineteen Eighty-Four in terms of the dissemination of information, disinformation, and propaganda, how one party could be an ally in the cause one day but an enemy the next, and the dread that anyone might be an informant ready to report you for anything.

The book ends with a poignant ode to England:

And then England — southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage underneath you, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen — all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

Prescient, no? Yet we keep falling asleep.

Etext: Homage to Catalonia

See also:
Christopher Hitchens: Why Orwell Matters
George Orwell's Prelude in Spain
George Orwell's Spanish civil war memoir is a classic, but is it bad history?

She has found an interstice

Ursula K. Le Guin is a wise woman. No one who has read any of her fiction could come to any another conclusion.

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters is a collection of Le Guin's blog writings. She has been blogging since 2010, having taken up the practice after being inspired by José Saramago's blog.

She reflects on aging, leisure, anger, writing, genre, feminism, social media, opera. She has interesting opinions to share. She tells tales of her cat.

Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in body — smiling, polite, apparently attentive — but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, wriggled into it, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.

I recently ordered this book for someone as a gift; it was only afterwards that I was lucky enough to see a review copy. Because of the nature of the collection, I think it is much more conducive to print than to e-publication (somewhat ironically, given its blogly origins). It's the sort of book you flip through, let something catch your eye, settle in to mull over an essay or two. As something to read cover to cover, it's a little disjointed.

What most impresses me is the spirit of the book, which the title captures well. Don't waste time, be mindful, think things through, do something.

Some quotable highlights
"Lying It All Away" (October 2012):

I have watched my country accept, mostly quite complacently, along with a lower living standard for more and more people, a lower moral standard. A moral standard based on advertising. That hard-minded man Saul Bellow wrote that democracy is propaganda. It get harder to deny that when, for instance, during a campaign, not only aspirants to the presidency but the president himself hides or misrepresents known facts, lies deliberately and repeatedly. And only the opposition objects.

"The Inner Child and the Nude Politician" (October 2014):

Children are by nature, by necessity, irresponsible, and irresponsibility in them, as in puppies or kittens, is part of their charm. Carried into adulthood it becomes a dire practical and ethical failing. Uncontrolled spontaneity wastes itself. Ignorance isn't wisdom. Innocence is wisdom only of the spirit. We can and do all learn from children, all through our life; but "become as little children" is a spiritual counsel, not an intellectual, practical, or ethical one.

"Belief in Belief" (February 2014):

I don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn't a matter of faith, but of evidence.

The whole undertaking of science is to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis, to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection — not to belief or disbelief.

Belief has its proper and powerful existence in the domains of magic, religion, fear, and hope.

Think about what matters.

The mind of a creature this alien

I don't know how to review nonfiction. For that matter, I'm not sure I know how to read it very well. Plain old fact just doesn't interest me much.

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness, by Sy Montgomery, is short on plain old fact, but deep in personal anecdote and light philosophical speculation.

Reading it doesn't feel like reading nonfiction at all, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Did I learn anything? Not much. I find octopuses fascinating; I've probably picked up a thing or two about them over the years, but I'm not an expert. This is not book to learn facts about octopuses. For that, see Wikipedia.

This book is for those people, like myself, who think octopuses are amazing but completely alien creatures.

Nagel concluded, like Wittgenstein before him, that it is impossible to know what it is like to be a bat. After all, a bat sees much of its world using echolocation, a sense we do not possess and can hardly imagine. How much further from our reach is the mind of an octopus?

Yet still I wondered: What is it like to be an octopus?

Isn't this what we want to know about those whom we care about? What is it like, we wonder at each meeting, in shared meals and secrets and silences, with each touch and glance, to be you?

Does this book answer those questions? No. But I think it knows at the outset that these are unanswerable things. It's not about consciousness per se. It's more about, as the subtitle suggests, glorying in the wonder of it all.

Octopuses are weird.

They taste with their skin. Can they taste our sadness, our pain?

Most of their neurons aren't in their brains, but in their arms. Is that what it takes for effective multitasking? Arms that can think independently?

Technically colorblind, how do they achieve camouflage? It's been suggested they see with their skin.

Assessing the mind of a creature this alien demands that we be extraordinary flexible in our own thinking. Marine biologist James Wood suggests our hubris gets in our way.

The book tours Jules Verne, Descartes, Antonio Damasio, Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau. Theory of mind and scuba diving lessons. It touches on the behaviour of animals of all kinds.

I may not have learned anything material, but I spent a few days in the excellent company of this naturalist and her engrossing stories of her several vertebrate and invertebrate friends.

Article
"Deep Intellect," Orion Magazine.

Video
Sy Montgomery: The Soul of an Octopus (59:25)
Do animals think and feel? (16:40)

People are people

I have been reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. I blame my mother. In fact, I hold her single-handedly responsible for the popularity of this book. (OK, it was probably Obama's recommendation.)

It was back in the fall that I went to the bookstore with a couple of coworkers at lunch, and we came across a display of Sapiens. I recognized the author's name as that behind Homo Deus, which my mother had been telling me about because she thought it would interest me (and she was right), having heard Harari in interview on one of her many news channels. So I pointed the book out to my coworkers, and before I new it they were both buying a copy. (At this point, I was still hoping that someone would get me the future-looking Homo Deus, rather than the history-based Sapiens, for my birthday.) Then started the raves, and the campaigning to "do" Sapiens for book club.

Fast-forward six months. We did indeed last week discuss parts 1 and 2 (of 4) of Sapiens at book club. We went more than three hours and spent most of it at each other's throats. Fighting mostly about feminism, I think, while mostly sober.

This book is provocative. It's not that Harari puts forth any contentious arguments — I'm hard-pressed to pinpoint anything I may actually have learned — it's merely the fact that these subjects were gathered and presented together. Things we take for granted but that we need to talk about. Capitalism. Racism. Sexism. Humankind's violent nature(?).

Some sections seem a little simplistic; that can't be avoided in a book with such ambitious scope.

I'm finding the book to be weirdly judgmental; Harari explains history on this grand scale and that it couldn't've unfolded any other way, but then blames us for it. I can't decide whether this is careless or deliberately manipulative in order to spur action to quell our darker nature, but if the latter is the case, it risks antagonizing the audience it needs to reach and preaching to the choir. Ultimately, where we've been, were we are, and where we're going — it's all inevitable.

I'm not very good at reading nonfiction, so I appreciated having book club as an incentive. I do plan on reading the second half of the book, but I may take a little break before getting back to it.

See also:
Harari's most recent article on the meaning of life in a world without work:

To the best of our scientific knowledge, human life has no meaning. The meaning of life is always a fictional story created by us humans.

It sounds like Harari is saying in this essay that in the future, we will all play video games all day long. But I will give Harari the benefit of the doubt that his writing is sloppy, that he does not intend to insult humanity and be so casually dismissive of our choices, that he is trying to express the more meaningful fact that humans are adept at constructing realities to occupy and amuse themselves.

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

Man does not actually accommodate science very much — he gets in the way of it

Sometimes I get strange thoughts, sometimes I think Chernobyl saved me, forced me to think. My soul expanded.

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich, is an utterly devastating document, assembled some 10 years after the 1986 accident at the nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine.

These are the accounts of witnesses and survivors: power plant physicists, emergency workers, and local farmers; those in power and those following orders; those who left, those who stayed, those who returned.

The scope of this tragedy is so vast; it deals in ignorance, incompetence, and a sovietism that blends pig-headedness, denial, and a deliberate attempt to cover up certain facts.

I don't think anyone needs convincing that Chernobyl was a disaster, both the fact of it and how it was managed. Astoundingly, for many, although the dangers were already known, it was preferred over the alternative. Some people, mostly elderly, refused to be evacuated, or returned shortly thereafter. This was the only land, the only life, they'd known. Others, they felt safer living with the physical threat of radiation in ready-made homes than enduring struggles for independence. People from Tajikistan and from Chechnya chose to resettle in the area surrounding Chernobyl because it was better than where they came from.

I was running away from the world. At first I hung around train stations, I liked it there, so many people and you're all by yourself. Then I came here. Freedom is here.

While this book depicts real events, at times it reads like science fiction. In particular, the physical and mental preparation to journey into the zone, cleaning up upon return from the zone, and drinking vodka to protect against radiation (a fully sanctioned practice, but complete bullshit) — these read like they're straight out of Roadside Picnic. It's more than the use of the term "zone" — it's the dread that the term embodies.

Robots were initially deployed to clean up Chernobyl, but the radiation disrupted their electronics and they broke down; so human clean-up crews were used instead.

A former head of the Laboratory of the Institute of Nuclear Energy talks about growing up in the glory days of science and science fiction, dreaming of nuclear energy and space travel; nuclear physicists were the best and brightest, it was a "cult of physics."

Life is a surprising thing! A mysterious thing! Now I believe. I believe that the three-dimensional world has become crowded for mankind. Why is there such an interest in science fiction? Man is trying to tear himself away from the earth. He is trying to master different categories of time, different planets, not just this one. The apocalypse — nuclear winter — has already all been described in Western literature, as if they were rehearsing it, preparing for the future.

[...]

Life is such a surprising thing! I love physics and thought that I wouldn't ever do anything but physics. But now I want to write. I want to write, for example, about how man does not actually accommodate science very much — he gets in the way of it. Or about how a few physicists could change the world. About a new dictatorship of physics and math. A whole new life has opened up for me.

Had Alexievich not been awarded a Nobel prize, I doubt I would've picked this book up; I'm not naturally a nonfiction reader, and the subject matter is depressing. But I'm glad I read it. It is horrific, but it is also eerily compelling. Since these are credited oral accounts, it's difficult to say that Alexievich is a great writer or even a journalist. Rather her craft is more like that of an editor's, curating the testimonials, selecting them and giving them structure and context. These accounts are sad, but they are balanced with occasional bits of humour and imbued with a deep sense of humanity. Alexievich very gently guides the reader from ground zero to Moscow and back again, navigating personal remembrances, military accounts, and the official record. Truly this is a literary chronicle of the soul.

One recurring theme is that of freedom. Tragedy, it seems, brings with it the gift of perspective and liberation. You come to know what's essential, and let go of the rest.

We'd ask each other: is this what our life is like? It was the first time we saw it from the outside. The very first time. It made a real impression. Like a smack to the head... There's a good joke: the nuclear half-life of a Kiev cake is thirty-six hours. So... And for me? It took me three years. Three years later I turned in my Party card. My little Red book. I became free in the Zone. Chernobyl blew my mind. It set me free.

Excerpt.
Review.

Caffeine or alcohol?

Why, I briefly wondered as I took a seat on the sofa, did everyone but me seem to find caffeinated beverages more conducive than alcohol to pondering the mystery of existence?

I'm with Jim Holt on this one. His book Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story is under discussion tonight at Argo Bookshop. I'm hoping the bookclub also favours alcohol over caffeine.

Although in essence it's a retrospective of modern philosophy and the major theories that might shed light on why there is something instead of nothing, but I love how it's framed as a personal journey, how sitting with one philosopher led Holt to call up the next.

I haven't actually finished reading the book — I just ran out of time — but I can't wait to see how it ends.

Check out Jim Holt's TED Talk for a summary of the issues.

The most important French writer you've never heard of

The Guardian calls Emmanuel Carrère "the most important French writer you've never heard of," and I quite agree. (Except for all the important French writers I've actually never heard of.)

It's an interesting profile for a few reasons, which are maybe all the same reason.

1. Major themes are identity and memory. The Moustache was brilliant on these points. (There's a novel that has really aged well in my memory.)

2. He seems to have found his niche writing nonfiction novels. Whether he recounts episodes from his own life, or somebody else's, what's the difference? (Must get my hands on his book about Philip K. Dick.)

3. He seems particularly interested these days in exploring his Russian heritage, which interests me in hopes that it may shed light on my own desire to know my Polishness. Which has nothing to do with the culture per se, but rather the need to know from whence you come.

I stopped writing fiction and began to write "non-fiction novels." I tried to write about the world and about myself, describing reality through my own experience.

Check him out in interview with the CBC's Eleanor Wachtel (Writers & Company).

Craving fiction

I've been a bit irritable this week. There was a bit of stress in getting the kid back to school — her supplies, our routine — but not enough, I don't think, to account for my crankiness. I think it's because I'm not reading enough fiction.

Working from home a couple days and getting a lift a couple other days meant not reading on my commute. My days are regularly grounded, or framed, or inspired, or escaped, by those twice-daily quarter-hour immersions in an imaginary world. Their absence is felt.

I'm still reading, though, but nonfiction. I'm actively reading two nonfiction books, one because it's related to a MOOC I've been following, another is for book club; there's a third languishing on my nightstand — I read a page now and then. They're all very interesting. But they're not exactly entertaining.

I deliberately decided that I needed to supplement my current nonfiction reading with some fiction. Short pieces by Robert Walser (which I've been meaning to get to for a couple years) seemed to fit the bill. But I was wrong. These Berlin "stories" are lovely prose poems, meditative essays, descriptive vignettes; but they're not stories.

[I've even found myself craving (gasp!) television this week.]

But I feel compelled to finish all these books before starting something new. So, here's to a couple more days of restlessness, here on a fact-based Earth, before escaping to a fictional universe.

Blue

This has been a most puzzling book. Sentence by sentence it's absolutely gorgeous, but I have trouble making sense of it.

On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, by William H. Gass, is about the colour blue, and about blueness, but mostly it's about sex. Kind of.

The thing is: it's breathtakingly beautiful. Just loll-your-tongue-around-it gorgeous. But it didn't make any sense. I get how blue refers to sex, but really? Random sex passages throughout all literature are blue? Random passages throughout all literature are really about sex? Everything is blue? Really?

So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that.

Then I read a couple of reviews, was reassured that I wasn't alone in being somewhat mystified, and gave myself over to it.

Then there are the blues we'd love to have loom large and linger long around us like deep sofas, accommodating women, and rich friends.

It's a great book for skimming, and there are sentences and long breathless passages that beg to be read aloud.

"For our blues," Hoogstraten says, "we have English, German, and Haarlem ashes, smalts, blue lakes, indigo, and the invaluable ultramarine." It is of course the skiy. It is the sky's pale deep endlessness, sometimes so intense at noon the brightness flakes like a fresco. Then at dusk, it is the way the color sinks among us, not like dew but settling dust or poisonous exhaust from all the life burned up while we were busy being other than ourselves. For our blues we have those named for nations, cities, regions: French blue, which is an artificial ultramarine, Italian, Prussian, Swiss and Brunswick blues, Chinese blue, a pigment which has a peculiar reddish-bronze cast when in lump-form and dry, in contrast to China blue which is a simple soluble dye; we have Indian blue, an indigo, Hungarian, a cobalt, the blues of Parma and Saxony, Paris, Berlin, and Dresden, those of Bremen and Antwerp, the ancient blues of Armenia and Alexandria, the latter made of copper and lime and sometimes called Egyptian, the blue of the Nile, the blue of the blue sand potters use. Are there so many states of mind and shades of feeling?

Reviews
The Guardian:

One difference is that much, or most, of Gass's self-conscious experiment is going on at the level of the sentence, its style and especially its sound, rather than look-at-me games with plot or character. This is partly a matter of poetic influence – Stevens and Rilke have been constant references – but the presiding example is probably Gertrude Stein, about whom he has written several essays. Stein is nowhere to be seen in On Being Blue, but the book is surely in thrall to her Tender Buttons and its incantatory way with the rhythms and phonics of everyday American speech.

Although, I wonder if that review merely skimmed the book, as Gass does directly reference Stein, including specifically Tender Buttons. And the review contains other factual errors.

NPR:

In many ways, On Being Blue is less a book to read than an experience to be had. It's essentially a rant, a riff, poetry, music, art, all of that. But it isn't apologetics. There's no scientific argument, no clear-cut hypothesis to be found. It's not a treatise on the nature of man and his place in the universe. Gass is more interested in getting across a passion for language, and the way the words look and sound on the page.

*************

On Being Blue was the subject of a book club I attended last week, and it turned out to be less inspiring of discussion than had been hoped. Without a clear thesis, it's difficult to argue against anything Gass brings to the table. While it's mostly internal to Gass — the connections he makes between colour, science, philosophy, sex, language — it's also weirdly impersonal. The thing to do is just read it, let it wash over you, accept it, and think about blue.

(curses without a curse, they contain only archery and cleverness like a purse full of chocolates and needles)

Excerpt.

Nature does not change

The One-Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka, is a "manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge" that challenges our views on agriculture and how it fits into our (modern) way of living.

Few are able to grasp correctly that natural farming arises from the unmoving and unchanging center of agricultural development.

To the extent that people separate themselves from nature, they spin out further and further from the center. At the same time, a centripetal effect asserts itself and the desire to return to nature arises. But if people merely become caught up in reacting, moving to the left or to the right, depending on conditions, the result is only more activity. The non-moving point of origin, which lies outside the realm of relativity, is passed over, unnoticed. I believe that even "returning-to-nature" and anti-pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the overdevelopment of the present age.

Nature does not change, although the way of viewing nature invariable changes from age to age. No matter the age, natural farming exists forever as the wellspring of agriculture.

And later,

There are always those who try to mix natural and scientific farming. But this way of thinking completely misses the point. The farmer who moves toward compromise can longer criticize science at the fundamental level.

Natural farming is gentle and easy and indicates a return to the source of farming. A single step away from the source can only lead one astray.

As if the point of our otherwise pointless lives is to aspire toward stillness.

I heard about this book when it was published as a New York Review Books classic a few years ago and it came up in relation to balcony gardening, which I was reading up on. Fukuoka's "do-nothing" philosophy has a great deal of appeal, although "do-nothing" is more work than it implies — more like "do no harm."

Fukuoka describes an epiphany he had that humanity knows nothing and that all our effort has no intrinsic value, is meaningless. I cannot help but relate this to my current readings on Socrates, Kierkegaard, and Hegel — having reached aporia, he intends to transmute it via negative action, not doing. Although nature does not change, Fukuoka states also that "nature is everywhere in perpetual motion"; he tries to achieve balance — a state (but, I think, not a process) of becoming.

I tend not to read much nonfiction but I am motivated because The One-Straw Revolution is a current book club selection. Come discuss it at Argo Bookshop tomorrow evening.

Larry Korn, a student of Fukuoka, and translator and editor of this book, has compiled several resources on Fukuoka and natural farming.

Kiki

Kiki de Montparnasse is a graphic biography written by José-Louis Bocquet and illustrated by Catel Muller.

Kiki was, as I've always thought of her, the woman behind Man Ray, or the woman who inspired him, or, at any rate, the woman he most famously photographed. That is, I'd never given her much thought at all, but she was, of course, more than any of those things. Her name was Alice Prin, she was a model and an artist, and she lived a life.



This is actually a pretty thick book, more than 400 pages, which makes it probably the largest comic book I've ever read. And it's a biography — I don't read much nonfiction at all. So as an impulse purchase, it's a little out of character for me, but one I don't regret. That impulse speaks to how compelling both the artwork and the subject matter are.

The story covers the traditional chronological narrative trajectory of a life, from birth to death, and it's very Kiki-centric — there's barely a page where she's not present. That may sound like a stupid thing to say about a biography, but I mean by this that there are no asides or tangents to give historical or other context regarding events or personages that would have an effect on her life. We experience Kiki's life as she did, as it unfolded.

Kiki modelled for, and otherwise encountered, several historical figures better known than her: Modigliani and Picasso, Bréton and Duchamp, Cocteau (right), Hemingway. Thankfully the book includes biographical notes to help identify the faces and provide some background. There's also a timeline.

The artwork is black and white, not overly detailed, sketch-like, lively. It lightly skips across the decades of a vibrant Paris, and invites the reader to consider the nature of art, photography, dada and surrealism, love. Was Kiki modelling or whoring? Pitiable hanger-on or self-made feminist? A life of indulgence or artistic sensibility?

For a summary of Kiki's life in the context of her Paris, see the four-part blog series by Catel & Bocquet: At the crossroads of the world.