Of Words and Things
This question comes up a lot for me: what are you reading these days? (And yes, I consider that question to be a lovely blessing). But I’ve had trouble answering it because my reading really is just more like sipping these days; it’s more like trying to save my life; it’s like learning to breathe all over again. It’s reading to steady one’s nerves. It’s about reminding me where I’ve been and where I need/want to go.
A book I’ve been obsessed with ever since the translation by Johnny Lorenz appeared in 2012 is A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector. I have made a point of not looking at it though for a while, because I don’t want the magic of it to become dull. I’ve been saving it for a time of need and that time is now. Yes, this might be the most dogeared book in my dogeared book collection. It also opens to a particular page where the binding has been cracked open (yes the light gets in). There is a section in A Breath of Life titled “Book of Angela” in which the Author character says, “Angela apparently wants to write a book studying things and objects and their auras. But I doubt she’s up to it.” And Angela says, “I’d really like to describe still life.”
And
“I can’t look at an object too much or it sets me on fire. More mysterious than the soul is matter. More enigmatic than the thought, is the “thing.” The thing that is miraculously concrete in your hands. Furthermore, the thing is great proof of the spirit. A word is also a thing — a winged thing that I pluck from the air with my mouth when I speak. I make it concrete. The thing is the materialization of aerial energy. I am an object that time and energy gathered in space.”
This is the way it is when you write books: the book that you’ve written emerges and the one you’re writing recedes a little, it calls to you, but it waits patiently and also nervously. And yet, they even sometimes speak to each other. The one I’ll be devoting more time to next is a book of essays on still life. It’s been roughed out for a while, and soon I will be able to concentrate on it again. (As Adam Zagajewski has said, it’s not time we lack but concentration). I know that I need to go into training to write this book: get up at 5am, stop drinking alcohol, work out more on the treadmill, lift weights, eat super healthily. Not even kidding. I need to sleep well and dream well, if I’m to get this book right. I need to eventually sort out my study, so that the angel books I read while writing EAE are back on the shelf, and the still life books can regain prominence.
We need to give our books a chance, though, and so for now I need to concentrate on Everything Affects Everyone. It’s a bit like time travelling. Books, too, are winged things.
Other books I keep returning to though are: Kate Zambreno’s To Write as If Already Dead, Love and Other Poems by Alex Dimitrov, Lovability by Emily Kendal Frey, and Indigo by Ellen Bass. They all read well together because they contain a tenderness, an openness. I don’t want to even talk about them, either, I just want to love them. You know?
I’ve also been reading Marilynne Robinson’s Jack at a snail’s pace. Just a few pages a night, and man that’s enjoyable — because the writing!! — but also pure pain. That character, of all her amazing characters, has maybe always been the one I loved the best. He’s so unfathomable, unknowable, so beautifully strange, and he’s the one that causes others the most pain. Yet, I know him. I’ve met him.
And so: the still life in the photos. The rich colours of the autumn fruits, mostly from our Italian Centre Shop. I was trying for something with a Luis Melendez feeling. In the header photo (which if you’re reading in the newsletter, you’ll need to click into the browser view to see), there is a modern version of the bread, fish, cheese, that Melendez would have used. You have to go with what you’ve got right? Which is really quite an instructive mode, I do believe.
October 26, 2021
