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.