Maiden Voyage, Denton Welch, Revisited

'William Burroughs recommended Denton Welch to students, perhaps as material ready to be cut up, each phrase or word a bright shiny object that could find itself next to new neighbours and lose none of its patina.'

Denton Welch likes bright shiny objects, he's already a collector, at 17, bargaining in the chinese interior in the early nineteen-thirties for old porcelain and curios. Even on the boat going out, he began.

In the Red Sea I wrote a poem ....  I had just come on deck with my drawing-book and I saw them (the burnt-up mountains) crumbling in long lines to the sea. They were like piles of brown sugar, everlasting and fierce, sticking up out of the sea. .... I leant on the rail and scribbled in my drawing-book. What I wrote seemed almost perfect.

He has run away from school and is now on a boat to china to join his father. He's an aesthete, which is to say, a hidden soul delighting in the surface of things. Here he is drinking tea:

Each cup had a lid, and when I lifted mine I saw whole leaves swimming in the water like a school of fishes. They were pale green. Some had not yet uncurled. I watched them opening with pleasure, and I thought we missed a lot in England by not leaving the tea-leaves in our cups. To watch them swirling and drifting is like watching the smoke from a cigarette. And what is smoking in the dark?

Denton Welch was hit by a car while cycling in Surrey, and suffered a fractured spine. He died at thirty-three. Not sure what brought me to Maiden Voyage this time. Maybe the need to travel without travelling, in the Finnish way. 

Aug 9 — Fog

I opened Aug 9 — Fog by Kathryn Scanlan and found, first time and every time thereafter, a daily life that spoke for all daily lives. 

Terrible windy    everything loose

is traveling

Kathryn Scanlan lived for fifteen years with a diary she found at an estate sale in Illinois, written by a woman in her eighties. This is all you need to know of a stranger, of yourself. Brevity is the entire soul towards the end.

 He called. Not so good. Bleeding

Again. Trying to knit pincushion.       

I have written a diary since I was fourteen, sifted days onto pages. Cora Lacy, in a small town in Illinois, between 1968 and 1972, kept a five-year diary, which later came into the possession of Kathryn Scanlan, who didn't read it for some years, and then when she did, absorbed it and gradually chose it, contorted, ordered and cut it. Every time I open the book I read a sufficient phrase.

D took cactus to basement

I think of the end of my mother's letters, the way she ran through a few concerns then slowed to a coda as she looked out of the window and wrote: the crocuses are starting to come out. That was the part I liked. Observation that quieted the concerns.

Fine snow rabbit got away. I took

pictures of the frost   ever where

beautiful

Kathryn Scanlan does not picture the diary writer; after fifteen years of re-reading, re-forming this inexhaustible textbook she came upon by chance, she possessed it; she doesn't know Cora Lacy, she is her.  And so am I. 

Turning cooler in eve. We had

smoked sausages, fried potatoes & 

onions. Dr. says it's a general 

breaking up of his body. I am

bringing in some flowers.

 

INVENTION & TRUTH

Why one kind of self-examination and not another, in a book? Chez Sara Baume, I don't recognise her past, only her present, workaday West Cork, with cold swims and tea, the sayable stratum of our journalling world. Whereas I recognise Andrea Bajani, I recognise his family, whence he comes, his anguish and persistence. Twenty pages into The Anniversary he identifies his mother independent of his father; he puts her in the kitchen talking to her friends.

What they talked about as they sat in our kitchen matters less than the fact that now, as I write about it, I can see my mother separately from my father. Which is to say that the act of writing, of chipping away, word by word, at that monolith of family memory taken up wholly by him, succeeds in extracting my mother from the rock. This access, through invention, to what memory doesn't possess is the brutal power of the novel, which by almost always disregarding the real provides the truth. And the truth is my father wasn't home.

This is explanation on a glacier, a backup of ice moving a family inch by inch. Family porn. I know that need to hedge with explanation, to immerse and re-emerge, to use the novel as a thinking machine, as Bajani says. I'm particular, we all are, about the tune the machine plays, how excruciated and for how long.

He is closer in than Sara Baume, is all I can say. 

the carrier bag theory of fiction — ursula le guin

We know about the sword out of the stone theory, the hero theory. Here is the carrier bag theory of fiction. Ursula le Guin prefers the bag, not the hero, as story, as sentence. The contents of your bag. A list can be full of repose. 

If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do the same again — if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all.

At home when I pick blackberries or go up the garden for salad or veg, at the market buying fish on a Wednesday, I am the woman with the basket, and yes, there's a freedom in having the fruits of your gathering to bring back in a basket, and process in due time, or just after, or breaking off mid-phrase, like the wood pigeon.

reading where you are

I am slow to read the novels that come out of Ireland now. Opening Night by Sara Baume is the first for many years. From the start I was uncomfortable. Too much stating of terms; explanation that allows for intimacy, rather than, au juste, the other way around. Like slow passage through a sieve. Ian Breakwell said he didn't want to read anything that had no risk, no invention. Or, I would add, that isn't old or ancient.

Running like a basso continuo these weeks I have read Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. The pages are wrinkled from our sentimental journey, in the autumn of 1991, through France and Italy down to Sicily and back. I read it on Bonassola beach, alternating with Borges' Seven Nights. So many sentences I could read over and over, between swims. A true marriage of beach and book.

I didn't pause at any phrase, any sentence in Opening Night. Contemporaneity happens in a strange silence. A permanent solar eclipse. Some worried birdsong and then silence. We are travelling along the N71, swimming at Toe Head or Lisheen Bay, having coffee in Bantry. There are dogs and names of dogs. It is relatable. An irksome shorthand. I am not hungry for any of this. I want to be, as Kafka said, plunged into the icy sea by what I read.

Mehalah, Gothic Novel, (A Story of the Salt Marshes)

John Berger writes about receiving his new book from the publisher, and, finding it badly produced, burning it. High-minded perhaps — he lived in the Alps — but I understand. An ugly book is sad. I got one in the post the other day: Mehalah Gothic Novel (A Story of the Salt Marshes) by Sabine Baring-Gould. Print on demand. Confect a cover out of online prompts; cram the text into 170 pages, which would be better spread over twice that. There was a time when I read gothic novels for their otherness, their badness, their removal from the here and now. Whatever I read I like it to be for pleasure. I like a book to be a book. This is a tomb. 

However, as a child of salt marshes, read it I must. It's a way of visiting my home turf, albeit in 1880. The flatness of the Essex coast has given it in recent times a flatness of character in the popular imagination. Back then there was a rich life with dialect and contraband, as well as some of the detail I remember from my childhood, like shrimps and winkles measured by the half pint in a pewter mug, and smoked eels, but most of all the marshes and their arcane channels and the bottomless mud I feared.

The plot is rich, fecund and ridiculous. The book was a sensation when it came out. Halfway through my reading I realised the author was a man, and a vicar. Which changed everything. Mehalah, most often called Glory, was a strong, capable, beautiful gipsy type, with a failing mother, a beloved George who vanishes, and an evil landlord Elijah who keeps a mad brother locked in the cellar. The twists of plot keep you, reluctantly, reading. Everything ends badly, which is what makes it gothic rather than romantic. Mehalah marries Elijah, not George, burns out his eyes with vitriol, feels guilty and, although George reappears, vows to atone for her sin by staying with Elijah, who padlocks them together in a boat and pulls out the plug.

There is much about the fires of God, which I noticed afresh after I knew the author was vicar of Mersea Island for ten years. To me this confuses everything, but it adds fire without going so far as the fires of hell imbued into the folk of Ireland. 

new yorker & virginia woolf, after the heatwave

A mother and two daughters living and talking with their bot friends in Cleveland, USA; the enhanced Olympics, impure competition no different from pure, both are camera-ready; the lost art of the bromance, american men and their friendships; two dramas of jewish identity I could relate to via films like dirty dancing; plus a poet's farewell to the world. "But, hey, it's not a deathbed till you die in it." This is New Yorker fare, read prone on a surly summer day, neither sunny nor breaking the drought. 

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts as antidote next day, and the one after that. I know the society of Virginia Woolf from inside; though I wasn't there I've read her long enough to be one of her own.

A paragraph more than halfway through, just after after the interval, as people are going back to their seats for the second half of the pageant, the va-et-vient of people and swallows in 1939, before her own death her place in someone's history, the pull of that in a garden. Harold Brodkey decided to write himself into his own death in a hospital bed. Virginia Woolf refines her place in England in the light of soon having none. 

For I hear music, they were saying. Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Look and listen. See the flowers, how they ray their redness, whiteness, silverness, and blue. And the trees with their many-tongued much syllabling, their green and yellow leaves hustle us and shuffle us, and bid us, like the starlings, and the rooks, come together, to chatter and make merry while the red cow moves forwards and the black cow stands still.  

Lolly Willowes

I was reading Lolly Willowes up at the pond, tired after yesterday's akebia purge, level with Lolly Willowes in her early twentieth century search for a way out; I had to remind myself I was the one up at the pond thinking of going in for a swim.

Mr Fortune's Maggot, Sylvia Townsend Warner, up at the pond

The beginning has to be given. Sylvia Townsend Warner borrowed from a library a book about a missionary in the South Seas, she had a dream, and wrote a novel Mr Fortune's Maggot. She sends Mr Fortune to a South Sea Island with increasingly vain and ludicrous missionary intent, seduced by flowers and fruit and a young brown boy, Lueli, who loses his idol as Mr Fortune loses his God, his harmonium and his sewing machine, in an earthquake; and so tells her own tale up to and including the centre parting of her hair and her roundy glasses, her tall boyish poet girlfriend, the remoteness and the passion exotic as a south sea island, ordinary as bathing and eating together, picking flowers, carving your own idol.

Maggot has another meaning, of whimsical decision and its consequence. I was pleased to learn that. It sits well beside the irish habit of 'acting the maggot'.

I read about Mr Fortune's gradual absorption and release into a tropical island up at the pond on another hot day, between dips and lemna retrieval. Transferring lemna to the edges of the pond, making a zone where snails, skaters and beetles can go back to the water, and soft feet press new lemna moss. I admire the warmth and soft roots of the lemna system. Lemna, duckweed, will cover a pond in a week. Very small frogs find their new legs under the edges of the pond; we can all rest there. 

Andrea Bajani

I read a story by Andrea Bajani in the New Yorker, 'Constellation'. I read the New Yorker stories often and rarely do they register, but this one, this take on the limping family at a particular pace with acceptance and curiosity in consort stops me without stopping, in the Finnish way. 

Like so many episodes of household violence, that night came to seem like a hallucination, a lurid memory of something that wasn't connected to our life together and so would eventually, lacking any handhold, fade away.

Roger Deakin in the field past Coachford

Reading Roger Deakin's Notes From Walnut Tree Farm in the field past Coachford, two afternoons de suite during a heatwave. P saw a kingfisher, twice. Rowers came by on the Wednesday, Thursday there was music from down the reservoir, nearer Coachford; a well-bred dog tested us out for ten minutes, two lads came down for a dip and shouted about in the water then left. I like sliding down into the water into an amphitheatre created by the curve of trees on the far side. Water levels are high so grassy banks are submerged. An oak tree for shade behind us, young oaks cut by the mower but growing again. Clouds of midges keep away. The picnic table across the water, untenanted. The second day we could hear a pump going on the far side, which gives rise to thoughts about this river, this reservoir, best water usage throughout the world, and worst, cooling our wretched data, as a reed in front of us rises and submerges in a southeast breeze.

Roger Deakin's notes in and around his Suffolk village chime with a reader in the field past Coachford. He records birds, trees, activities of all kinds on the land in the village, on the common. The long view. The wide and permanent view. The red of the red. Green of the green. Roger Deakin follows the ant on his pages, the life of a neighbour spider, the diet of his local hedgehog. He regrets there's no one to be there to fold sheets in the dance of backing and advancing and putting away. He digs up docks in the field, keeps their blackened stalks, defends the integrity of Cowpasture Lane, bewails modern villas around the common, swims in the moat, sleeps in the railway wagon, wakes with the birds. 

I share one moment of his Suffolk past: the Rougham Tree Fair, where I met my sister once in the seventies, and could have met Roger Deakin. She was well into a drive-past of pony and trap; I don't what this satisfied for her or for how long. I slept in the porch of her tent. I remember nothing about trees. Or music. I remember face-painting.

A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor

A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor, a middling novel for midsummer, middle of England, middle of the twentieth century,  8, Jessica Terrace, Swanford, Buckinghamshire, England, The World, The Universe, to be precise. 

I finished it up at the pond today, toasted front and back. One dip. Much collection of duckweed with the net between times. All trapped tadpoles returned. A jackdaw came down to wet his wings. I can be an impatient and a loving reader. I lose track of the names of people's mothers, but I'm touched by the tiny, sordid, intimacies of hands inside coats, the teenager's gaze, the pathos of her teacher; last scenes leave an indeterminate rush of affection. 

A short rhetoric for leaving the family, by Peter Dimock

A short rhetoric for leaving the family, by Peter Dimock. Everything about the title draws me, all four things: short and rhetoric, leaving and family. Rhetoric is not a word I use often, but I like to meet it, shelter there a while, cloaked in careful, pleasured vocabulary. 

I am writing, this season, a letter to the owner of the lands around us, from whose family I have bought before, several times. I take seriously the task of writing to him about my reasons for wanting to buy the fields that originally spread around the house I have lived in for a half-century. So I read a book whose hundred or so pages are an address to the narrator's two nephews. He is leaving them his money to enable them to leave the family, should they wish, and he hopes they will wish when they have absorbed, in ten years time, when they will be twenty and twenty-one, the full horror of their grandfather's involvement in the American military plans for Vietnam in the 1960s.  

Sometimes a reader is a translator. Signals are set off in personal history. Translator sounds too definitive, as if one language for another equalled one coin for another, and no change. Peter Dimock reminds me how remote I am from the general parlance. And that's lesson enough as we approach midsummer. 

Roger Deakin and Zadie Smith

In the same time lapse I read Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books on Art for Our Sakes, and then work my way fast and respectfully to the Central Asia chapters in Roger Deakin's Wildwood, which do it for me every time. Art, novels, poems, have internal order. Beauty. Tragedy. Human, above all. Reading a novel by Edward P. Jones encouraged Zadie Smith to go to New York and give this talk. For our sakes.

Roger Deakin travels from Almaty, place of apples, capital of Kazakhstan, into the mountains where he meets Valery.

After rattling across several miles of this high savannah we pull up before a mound of wooden beehives, an old Mercedes van and a curvaceous wooden caravan sheathed in sheet steel that could have come straight out of La Strada. I fully expect to see Anthony Quinn ease himself out of it, yawning and stretching in long johns and a buttoned vest after a strenuous night. And I am not disappointed. It is Valery who comes out, looking every inch as good, his eyes slitted against years of steppe and desert sun, shining brown skin stretched over high cheekbones, his face benevolently lined. ... We're intruding on a peaceful, almost monastic life in one of the most beautiful places on earth. ... I'm sad to leave the solitary Valery, whom I instinctively like. When we shake hands, it is the two-handed lingering double-clasp kind with a deep look into the eye. The look says, 'We come from vast distances apart on this earth, yet I feel a natural, spontaneous respect for you. It is very moving, that we far-flung people from different tribes are clearly first natural friends, not enemies at all'. I nearly catch myself making the little speech, but restrain myself in time. 

As Roger Deakin in the hills of Kazakhstan, so Zadie Smith in New York giving a talk at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, confirm what's valuable in us humans on this earth. 

twentieth century villages

Change in the village was published in 1912. George Bourne was a man of socialist good will. He thought exhaustively about the hundreds of Acts over hundreds of years that enclosed common land away from the peasant. He made an argument in five parts.

           I      The Village

II     The Present Time

III     The Altered Circumstances

IV     The Resulting Needs

V     The Forward Movement

People whose lives were dependent on the common land where they could graze a cow or a donkey, cut their firing, their reeds for lamps, must now buy their livelihood from an employer and lose their relationship with the land.

In the nineteen sixties Ronald Blythe interviewed people where he lived in rural east suffolk to make a portrait of a village he called Akenfield. He talked to farm labourers, gardeners, farriers, wheelwrights, teachers, old families and recent incomers, some of them drawn to east suffolk for unknown reasons. I liked the teacher who came to realise that what he wanted to teach was how to find out what is most valuable in yourself and how to keep it alive. 

Ronald Blythe lived and worked at Bottengoms Farm in Wormingford until his death, following the opinion expressed in The View in Winter that the elderly should remain in their own homes whenever possible. He never learned to drive and did not use a computer.

Akenfield on google summons a Stephen King story/film/play about a small, remote village in nineteenth century Pennsylvania that lives in fear of nameless humanoid creatures, "Those We Do Not Speak Of", that inhabit the surrounding woods.

Where was the village supposed to take place? People ask. Google as ever, on the money. 

This is The Forward Movement.

I've read three books lately about English villages in the twentieth century, all of which I've read before. This must be because I've been trying to write about where I live. In fact there is little connection between these villages in the early and mid-twentieth century and the place I live in Ireland, except that Akenfield, written by Robert Blythe in the nineteen sixties, overlaps with my growing up in Essex. So what am I doing? Bolstering my nerve for understanding where I live now?

native denizens

Who are the fellows who cut the hay, nowadays. George Ewart Evans, writing about a Suffolk village more than a hundred years ago, knew who cut the hay, what their tools were called. 

James at the gravel pit up the road showed us boulders, and chatted a little. Eighty per cent of the ornamental gravel they sold was imported, he said. The local boulders we chose would be prized in Galway. The gravel of my childhood on the east coast of England, was exotic in Cork. Very yellow, very clean and fresh. That's how you know this is a rich country, I said, when people prize stones from another town, another country, more than their own. I hadn't thought about that, said James. Varieties of gravel around the cornus contraversa variegata in the visitor carpark confused the shrub so it became invisible. This is very mediated landscape. Earth and stones unearthed, displayed. Meanwhile out in the boulder zone goat willow showed through, some bird's foot trefoil. The mud was caked and cracked like Africa. 

Why were we choosing boulders, you might ask. Who cuts the hay around here. The zero grazing machine, that's who. That's why we were choosing boulders.

George Bourne — another George — in his 1912 book Change in the Village, said:

.... how attached he must have grown — I mean how closely linked — to his own countryside. He did not merely 'reside' in it; he was part of it, and it was part of him. He fitted into it as one of its native denizens, like the hedgehogs and the thrushes. All that happened to it mattered to him. I feel a forlornness in country places, as if all their best significance were gone.

People cannot talk about themselves in their place any more. The ground is too unstable. You can't stop progress, as the energetic lying husband says in the film Muriel's Wedding.

In the School chapter of Ask the Fellows Who cut the Hay I lingered on this, coming full circle on where I lost track of arithmetic:

How many furlongs, rods, yards, feet and inches and Barleycorns will reach round the earth, supposing it according to the best calculation to be 25,020 miles? The boy, in a page of working, threw a girdle of 4,755 million Barleycorns round the earth.

running in the family

The other night I plucked a book from the shelves in the dark: Michael Ondaatje's running in the family was in my hand. A childhood in Ceylon, family as riotous as was manageable in prose, albeit poetic prose. In the poetry is the managing. Snakes run through the house. The cobra that settled on the radio was not shot because the radio was the only source of music in the house. The snakes ate the hens' eggs, so hundreds of ping pong balls were introduced in the nesting boxes, which disabled the snakes for a while. Mervyn Ondaatje, Michael's father, ended up keeping hens. As did the mother of Marguerite Duras. Last dance of a falling family. 

Michael Ondaatje found everywhere stories and people in Ceylon when he went back after twenty some years, he found roads and food, trains and verandahs. In and around Maldon, Essex, where I grew up, I found the places I went to get away from stories and people: salt marshes, old allotments, disused railways. Between the chickens and the cacti and succulent society, I came to like Mervyn Ondaatje.

He kept journals about every one of the four hundred varieties of cactus and succulents—some of which he had never seen, others of which he had smuggled into the country via a friend. Important days were those when certain water plants arrived from islands in the Pacific.

Inside Jacob's Room

Afternoon up at the pond with Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room after a conversation with D by the bonfire the other day about Fahrenheit 451 & which book we'd choose to learn, to be. After a long pause D said Wuthering Heights, though she didn't want to be Wuthering Heights, either. I said I could imagine being something by Virginia Woolf, many years after the dream in which I talked to her about writing & she said it would be all right. I already am something by Virginia Woolf.

Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a blind mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart — her sinful, tanned heart — for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother's wild song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with her dog against her breast.

Virginia Woolf is the model observer, passionate & dispassionate, questioning & confirming, full of doubt and assumption. Making firm and letting go. Jacob is a carrier more than a character. No one interacts except in these paragraphs. Jacob's room is Virginia's room also. And mine.

 

strange things

'But really Mattis', she said with a toss of her head, 'you think up so many strange things these days that I hardly recognise you.'

This testimony made him light up with joy. Hege knew how to make you happy when she wanted to. He went and sat down by himself to be alone with his joy.

I have been rereading The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas these nights, for the clean otherness of Norway. Mattis lives with his sister Hege by a lake. She knits jumpers to earn a living. He thinks up a job as ferryman, he has only one passenger ever, but he goes ferrying every day. He has a job to go to. He takes sandwiches. His simplicity sets him apart. He ferries no one in his leaky boat that couldn't take a passenger anyway. 

The canadian woman at the radical book fair on Saturday nearly knew strangeness by heart.

Reality could be avoided.

It's possible.

No one who looks at me

believes I am dancing.

She said it across our table of books. Like Mattis having his strange things acknowledged. She looked along the display of Coloured Books, and sometimes at me, disbelieving. She'd been in Cork for three months, au pairing. This was the end of her stay. The privacy of that internal dancing was suddenly there between us.

Erasmus in Inniscarra

I noticed this fragment on the front terrace for a day or two before bringing it indoors. Placed on a square of paper it became a drop-down map, somewhere between Italy and Ceylon.

There's an anecdote about Erasmus noticing a scrap of paper on a muddy street and pausing to read it. The printed word was rare in the 15th/16th century; rare also those who could read. Which is still true in the twenty-first century.

It looks like a partly rotted seed packet from Seed Savers. As a child I read labels on jars, info on cereal packets, all kinds of small print, and a constant flow of books. As an adult also. As well as t-shirts and tattoos, cardboard boxes in several languages.

My Erasmus scrap of paper could have continued, out on the terrace, to deteriorate, to transmute, with its inks, into the front garden and beyond. 

WASTE OF LANGUAGE

In Arthur's book emporium P spotted It walks by night and was immediately drawn. Arthur gave it to him, for the title, one of the dark green Penguin crime series. One damp afternoon I read it, if reading includes whizzing and forgetting and getting impatient, annoyed at this waste of language. 

How schematic the duke, the tennis pro, the lunatic, the gombeen man, the shady woman, the fresh uncomplicating Americans, decoys all, in the sealed room puzzle. How did someone get in and out of the card room, slice the duke's head off with a heavy sword kept sharp for just such an occasion. 

I don't see life in terms of puzzles. I'm annoyed that I've been drawn in to this universe where everything is for a purpose. Which is why the god-fearing good citizen can read detective novels with a clear conscience.

It walks by night. It, not He, not She, not They, walks by night. And in Paris. A gambling den. A chinese purveyor of hashish and opium. A chief of police. It is a woman, the duke's wife, with eyes of ambergris, who kills the duke who is not really the duke but her first husband, out of prison and in disguise. 

In a detective novel written by a man, J. Dickson Carr, in 1930, it, is likely to be a woman. A man is a man in all his guises, a woman is denatured if she acts. Is that it? 

SAPPHO PAGES

Sappho pages are mostly empty, which means you can read them in any order. 

but I to you of a white goat

and I will pour wine over 

That's one page.

and gold chickpeas were growing on the banks 

That's another.

Some pages have columns of square end brackets. You read the few words that are still legible somewhere, extant, the square brackets lead off into the missing piece of papyrus. Others are quotes in ancient authors, surrounded by bracketless space and a deeper, less populated silence. 

Sappho was a poet/singer on the island of Lesbos circa 630 B.C. Anne Carson's translation and arrangement of all that's there and all that's missing, is my current warm-up reading.   

I have been reading and rereading and reading out loud to an audience, my own pages and much that is missing from them, working their sequence and letting it go out there and come back as afterwords, afterimage.

Sappho is all there is of her, and, as I pluck the pages, of me.

gathering flowers in so very delicate a girl 

Natalia Ginzburg & Beryl Bainbridge, Lynne Tillman

Two of the early essays in Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg are about London in the early 1960s, the melancholy, desolation, lack of imagination, and the depressing food. She admires the get-up of old ladies in evening wear, and otherwise can find nothing to like. 

Beryl Bainbridge in The Bottle Factory Outing speaks for this England. Employees at an Italian bottle factory in London go on an outing: big blonde Freda, mousier Brenda, fumbling Rossi, aloof Vittorio, Patrick who'd fix a leaking toilet. Seediness turns nasty. 

I keep putting the book down. Natalia and Beryl. Even their names fight each other. I read Little Virtues twice on our ten day trip to Portugal, struggled to finish The Bottle Factory Outing. Promise of worse in a seedy world is not the best for spring travel.

The last three essays in  Little Virtues are wonderful. I read them in a strange agony of appreciation, so easily can recognition turn to pain. The best was reading on the beach at Cacela Velha, the second or third time. P was practicing tightrope walking on the sand without a rope but with a balancing pole. The empty beach with very fine sand and a calligraphy of grasses crisscrossed by black beetles making long work of our lunch crumbs, draws in every empty beach I've known, Natalia Ginzburg draws in my thoughts about human relationships and silence. And the sun shines. I've chosen the house over the water where I would stay or live, the oldest of them, nearly buried in pines.

FALLOW

FALLOW   

formal visceral viral philosophical comical botanical  

A READER'S GUIDE

There's a point where reading is no different from writing; there is more reading than writing when you are writing.  I have been reading/writing on the subject of fallow for the last few months. The writing is even sparser than usual, as befits a fallow field. The reading is broadcast across the floor of my room, with concentration around the stove. Salinger, Anne Carson, New Yorker, NYRB. Cabin notes, on my desk, to be reprinted. When I was twelve I was instructed, in the interests of better sight without glasses, to rest my head in my hands and think about nothing. This was the beginning of my acquaintance with nothing. This is why I am adept at walking, reading, writing fallow fields for weeks on end, around dusk.

For Esmé With Love And Squalor

When I was about thirteen this title on my parents' bookshelves, with a lurid Pan cover — completely off the mark — For Esmé with Love and Squalor by J.D.Salinger, caught my eye. I read it the way you read when you need to be reading, for and against the future. At thirteen, Esmé's own age, you use what you have learned so far, in anticipation of more. Esmé is precociously articulate, aware of what fabric this is, this language she can't help performing on a wet afternoon in a café after choir practice. And yet, for all that, there's an honesty, a straightforwardness. She is waiting for her hair to dry to show that it is actually wavy hair. She is looking after her younger brother Charles who chokes over the punchline of his only riddle. What did one wall say to the other? Meetcha at the corner. She wants this American soldier/story writer to write a story for her. Not just for her, she amends, but for her. 

idle reading

Much of current reading is infill: I read before I write; I read when I can't sleep; I read in the bath. The rest of the time I am weeding, managing the days, cleaning and replacing. There's an important small pile to the left of my stove: two books by Lena T who stayed with us last year, Anne Carson's Plainwater, an article in the New York Review of Books about classical music, and how it could be the answer.

Some critics have held out hope that classical music, whose decline mirrors the decline of the utopian imagination, might play some part its recovery as well.

The other piece in this pile is another article from the New York Review of Books, by Merve Emre, 'The Illusion of the First Person'. I re-read it every week or so. Tonight I am not ready to read it again. Some pieces you only need to know they're there. Like Thomas Browne, whose capital letters for Elements and Legalities continue to affect my writing though I haven't read him for many years. Or JD Salinger, whom I am re-reading, the italics of his speech, helpless emphases of family life, endemic conversation we need to rehearse.

JD Salinger and Anne Carson, at dusk

I like to have a bath early evening, to divide the day from the night. I read, for preference, the New Yorker. Today Jill Lepore remembered a house she lived in as a student in Boston with fluid others and shouty neighbours, several cats. Then, up in my room, in front of the stove I look again at Franny and Zooey. In the middle of the night last night I read the letter Zooey reads from his older brother Buddy, near the start of the Zooey section of the book. Zooey is reading in the bath, the letter resting on his dry knees. A well-thumbed letter, four years old. Some family is worth hanging onto. JD Salinger is a voice from my library, wearing his cleverness, like Zooey, like a wooden leg.

Anne Carson is adept at deploying her wooden leg. I have had Plainwater out for some weeks now, and this evening was the start of 'Canicula di Anna', which she rapidly inhabits so that several pages in she speaks for Anna, a creature of renaissance Italy as much as for herself; she is not concerned what we think. Any more than any of us in last night's dream as we clambered about our business. P swam the length of a cold pond. There were clouds of paper in the bedroom. And one of P's former students.

Corgi Height: twelve inches above the ground

An ageing civil servant out for a walk with his Corgi in Kent, 1950s or earlier. He strolls his Kentish lanes, his Corgi coursing around, he says, quartering the lane, chasing rabbits. Hedgerows, cornfields, hop-gardens and apple orchards on either side. He is recalled from his meditations by a yelp of pain and fear from a field away. The Corgi needed help. Kentish hedges were high and dense.

Finally I took off my coat, and pushed it before me through the hedge. ... Bramble and eglantine parted before me, and the cruel spines of the hawthorn. The coat saved my face, but from one or two back-lashings of briar sprays I caught some feline scratches on hands and wrists. And an ankle suffered too.

He finds his dog four or five feet through a thicket, beside a stream, caught in rusty wire in front of the rabbit burrow, whimpering. The only way to get to his dog was to lie down on his belly and make his way, slug-like, muddy and wet through the open space between the ground and the bottom growth of the thicket.

There we lay together, a muddy pair. Now I had to get him out. ... it was not so easy ... I looked about me, to realise that for once I was looking at the world from below, from Corgi height ... the smallest weed, the speck of dust, magnified, or conversely the whole world dwarfed to the compass of this patch of woodland and meadow-fall ... I was looking at the universe from below.

I read several of the pieces in Small Moments, by Richard Church, to see why I'd bought the book whenever I did — some drift towards small, towards moments, the ivory paper with wood-engravings, all this would have seduced me, if to be seduced is to understand only this much — then the story of the Corgi chasing rabbits and the civil servant/poet pushing through a hedge and a thicket, confirmed that this was an other person's rendering of what I know, what William Blake, Henry David Thoreau and so many ruralists and poets, know also. Then it's just a question of how you like your eggs. 

THE WHATSAPP DIARY

I read an article by Sam Knight in the New Yorker about whatsapp. I read it in several goes, unable to pursue it start to finish. Each time I started at a different point and registered a different thought about our detachment from our lives, the saturation of that detachment, the loss of solitude. We are — you are, I don't have a phone — all writing diaries on our phones, wallpapering our current lives with phatic white noise, ready for the moment of total amnesia. Which has already arrived. 

25 million times a second after the World Cup in Dubai, whatsapp buzzed. A new fabric of the earth. 

I write a diary. With a pen on paper. A fountain pen, with ink, paper of a certain size and texture. For many years I wrote every day, and cheated if I missed a day. Now I write every day or two or three. And it's gnomic or banal. The gnomic I need to write. No one is reading it. I'm talking to myself. The banal is, yes, banal, and crucial to sanity. Descriptions of stasis and departure are crucial. Frogspawn and pussy willow. The back of the cat looking out at a hooded crow. Wake up.

WhatsApp is phatic before anything else. It is an architecture of presence. It winks with life, informing you who is online and when they were last seen. Tiny bundles of data—relayed on the app's servers through sockets, or continuous connections—tell you that your best friend is typing.

A Polish ethnographer, Bronisław Malinowski, a 1922 book coined the phrase 'phatic communion' for those idle phrases we exchange in recognition of our common humanity and which dissolve on impact, or used to. Except now, on WhatsApp, they don't, they stay there forever in data centres where night and day they consume electricity and water to cool our communal fever. 

 

Russian influence

The last story in Elephant, a selection of Raymond Carver stories, is an imagining of Tchekov's death, over a glass of champagne, which led me back to Aldo Buzzi Tchekov in Sondrio, followed by JM Coetzee's imagining of Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg. Reading in January has a russian influence. Follow it. 

Chekhov died at forty-four. Since the age of twenty-eight, he had suffered from insomnia, and he treated it by drinking a bottle of beer every night, often of bad quality. He thought that he was descended from the artisan Andrei Chokhov, who cast the colossal cannon (the czar of cannons, which never succeeded in firing) that is in the garden of the Kremlin, near the czar of bells, an enormous bell, broken during casting, which never succeeded in ringing—symbols, in Chekhov's words, of that "Russian tendency to spend money in the construction of every kind of uselessness when the most pressing human needs are not yet satisfied".