THICK AND THIN

The clocks have changed. Damp day. So-so mushroom foray after breakfast. Then the wilds of ryanair online for a while. For the rest of the daylight I read Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts, stopping a while after each short chapter — a walk, going to the supermarket, or the cafe, away on a trip, and home, the piazza, needing to hear a car go past in order to sleep. This is slim writing, low-key, less icy than Fleur Jaeggy, more bewildered but safe, somehow, in her city. 

In the bath I read Alexander Navalny, 2022 to 2024, in prison in the soviet arctic, calling out, sending hugs, reminding people not to be afraid. He shovels snow with a frozen wooden shovel. His only company on the cell block is an operatic psychotic who doesn't sleep. He knows he may well die here. 

Thick and thin reading at another turn of the year. The sky flushed red at dusk.

TANGO - FLEUR JAEGGY AND EILEEN MYLES

Fleur Jaeggy, swiss smooth and chilled, now partner on my private dance floor to Eileen Myles, open american and rough, both writers of hyper-aware short books. I bought The Water Statues and For Now in London, two short neat books, almost the same size. My favourite kind of reading. You read them once you read them twice, you look over them again for sentences that correspond to you in your inner receptive spaces.

I hadn't read Eileen Myles before. For Now is a talk she gave at Yale in 2019, who bought her archive. She is conversationally endearingly blunt. 'I have a very definite feeling that I am simply living ...' Living, thinking, copying is what she does. She is blunter than Fleur Jaeggy and blunter than me by a poet's mile. She talks and she talks and meanders with intent.

If you ask me to tell you why I write it probably has to do with this deep comfort/discomfort of being in the world and this option of devotion. If I want to sit here and copy all day that might be the best option available to me, it's not an anti-depressant and it's not exhilarating and it's not aerobic but it is a form of chanting and I do do it for religious reasons. I mean it's my default position.

Fleur Jaeggy's comfort/discomfort is far more processed. The eponymous water statues, collected in a flooded basement, are the carriers of her history. This is an intense, prickly, non-linear book of terse little chapters, often only a page, unheaded, beheaded. If a tale is told it's told in ice and avoidance, as in certain families, where the only alternative to ice is the slush or marshiness after a slight thaw. 

Beeklam, her main character, as a child wished to live as though he'd drowned. 

He was once again persuaded that his life was passing, had passed, and this made him rejoice while admiring the efforts of his fellow creatures, of the Dutch population with their firmness regarding the radiant pinnacles of domestic comfort —such home-sweet-home settings made his heart sink, so much happiness he was happier living without.

How writers try to characterise their own strangeness. This is the tango's turn and poise. These are defiantly singular writers, with what Fleur Jaeggy calls a theological ability to live alone. 

Eileen Myles would say it differently. She returns often to the question of 'my writing', 'that fuzzy category', what it is and when she is doing it, like now, writing a talk to be given at Yale, and if not how to say what it is. About thirty pages into the book, the talk, in a long sentence of a page and a half, she does what sometimes a writer of our ilk has to do, she says what writing feels like, how it is never ease, how it is perched in relation to this other thing called living.

Reading the beach

The day I go to the beach without a book is the day I read the shallows. After all the dogs and most of the people have gone home for lunch, we move down from our grassy spot onto the beach. P goes off to look for a stick and I stare into the shallows, prop my feet up on the awkward yellow stones. There are spectral young shrimp or prawn amid new growth seaweed. It's a rough stone beach you have to clamber as much as walk. The best is propped up on a rock staring into shallow water.

Do I read a beach near Kilmacaloge as Fleur Jaeggy, as Ingeborg Bachmann? They are company, for sure. 

Ingeborg Bachmann, suite et fin + Fleur Jaeggy

Ingeborg Bachmann leaves a reader uneasy, unended, upended, suspended. I didn't want to get to the end and I did, early this morning. Almost immediately the question is what to read next. Fleur Jaeggy was Ingeborg's friend. They spent time together. I'll re-read Brother of XX. 

Fleur Jaeggy leaves you frozen. She is Swiss. But relieved. She writes these short, fleshless pieces and then she is relieved. For now. 

Once with Ingeborg we talked about old age, she smiled at that word, but that word was accompanied neither by the heart nor by a real smile. I imagined a longevity without death, a house in the country, a wall. I described to her the external architecture and I bound her with a rope. And a garden within the walls and again I said to her the two of us. I was terribly convinced. A headstrong conviction about what doesn't come true.

Up at the pond, Fleur Jaeggy reads as a substrate of pond life. Pond skaters on the surface tension, caddis fly larvae in their pine needle cigars, tadpoles with spectral legs, dust of millions. The dancing flies are dancing low over the water today. You can't follow any one of them for more than about five seconds. 

On the 31st July, we left Rome by car, an Alfa Romeo 2600, for Poveromo-Forte dei Marmi. Ingeborg Bachmann manned the road maps. It seemed like a great voyage, with Poveremo  further away than Vienna and Klagenfurt, where we had already been. But now we were to spend a month together. Already that could be a mental voyage: cohabitation, prefiguring. The house we had rented was vast, with a garden. But the water was salty. Our first pot of tea was disgusting. 

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

I came to Ingeborg Bachmann through reading Fleur Jaeggy. 

On the 31st of July, 1971, we left Rome by car, an Alfa Romeo 2600, for Poveremo-Forte dei Marmi. Ingeborg Bachmann manned the road maps. It seemed like a great voyage, with Poveremo further away than Vienna and Klagenfurt, where we had already been. But now we were to spend a month together. Already that could be a mental voyage: cohabitation, prefiguring. The house we had rented was vast, with a garden. But the water was salty.

Though we cannot know what it is to be a bat, as Thomas Nagel said, we can imagine what it is to be part of a culture, the two of them meshed in the Italian afternoon, with the rest of Europe behind them. Ingeborg and Fleur in Liguria. But the water was salty. Tilda Swinton striding through as Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Jacob Taubes in Vienna, sucking on his pipe, his philosophies. Me in Paris, in 1968, learning how to yearn in french.

On page 40 of Malina, there is a piece of young writing ecstasy.

A storm of words starts in my head, then an incandescence, a few syllables begin to glow, and brightly coloured commas fly out of all the dependent clauses and the periods which were once black have swollen into balloons and float up to my cranium, for everything will be like EXULTATE JUBILATE in that glorious book

One night in Paris, May, 1968, I got up in the middle of the night, washed, dressed, put on earrings, got out my diary and wrote six or seven visionary pages.

That night I knew what it was to be Ingeborg Bachmann, though at the time I did not know of her existence. 

Reading in Portugal

For the first few days in Portugal I read nothing, stunned by being in another country after three years. All I could do was read the flowers, the orchids on the coastal path, the waves on the beach, the surfers on and under and among, long-legged dogs digging holes in the sand and then lying in them, a five year-old girl playing ringmaster with her younger brother who is now a cat, now a tiger. 

I brought Bohumil Hrabal but he is not good for beaches. I read, on the first page of Too Loud A Solitude, his wonderful sentences about how books spread through the sensibility of reader, and that was enough.

Because when I read I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

I turned to Anne Carson. Poetry is easier, slighter and deeper. The poem arrives from nowhere and disappears without trace. Understanding also disappears without trace, into the sand, into the sea. Everything, by then, is between the lines.

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to be to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere.

In the local supermarket I picked up a few cards. I read them over and over and absorbed the social and animal needs of southwestern anglo Portugal in 2022.

Carole Perrin, Magnetizer/Energetician. Quantum Therapy. Energy Treatment.

Wild Soul Alice, Wild Soul Healing, Reiki, Sound Healing, Yin Yoga. 100% Pure Oils.

Else, Private Chef, Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner. Fingerfood & Cocktails, a unique culinary experience in the comfort of your (holiday) home.

Svenja, Happy Buddy Dog Therapist, following the principles of living in a pack. Sensibility, Communication, Understanding, Positive Intensification. The key for a happy relationship.

Noah Balulis, Creative Writer.

Along the way, mostly at night, I read John Williams' Nothing but the night, trying to overlook the overwriting. A young person's book can be fresh, but this one is laboured, all descriptions are multiple. I only have to see an 'and' between epithets and I start to groan.

From the orchestra stalls at a rare surfer-less beach, I started reading Fleur Jaeggy again. I am the brother of XX. The stories are short. The sentences are sharp. We're always being jolted to a stop. There's no satisfaction to be had. That's fine by me. The satisfaction is all out there, in the waves & the sun. There is calm amid a vague stealthy disquietude. 

It's nice to sit on a bench and think, with a feeling of reciprocity, of the void.

Fleur Jaeggy knows the void like the back of her hand, like her pocket. She drops the start of a story like a small bomb.

The pain her son had caused her by choosing to die on a day in spring was less than she had expected. He is happy now, she said. And she herself felt almost relived. She would have liked to die that way. 

This story is called 'The Perfect Choice'. The son in question was sickly and suffered from insomnia.

The only son had become so tired he no longer cared about insomnia. He didn't even notice. He stayed up all night, it seemed to him that he had a great deal to do, in the doing of nothing.

The beach is like that. There is a great deal of nothing to do, watching walls of water best each other like children. A kite man is high above the beach, sitting under his sail like an early aviator. He has no mission except staying up there and then coming down when he chooses and moving to another beach.

Fleur Jaeggy, Hortus,

The Paris Review described reading Fleur Jaeggy as not unlike diving headlong, naked, into a bramble of black rose bushes. 

I would say, medicinal. Leaves you slightly numb. In need of antidote. 

She is the kind of writer who gets under your skin so you can't help imitating. 

If she gets under your skin it's because she was already there.

Fleur Jaeggy is a sharpener. At no point does she reassure. Au contraire. The ground is likely to vanish under you. Yes, the depths of your bramble roots. Vanished also.

I read a piece in the New Yorker about the value of pain in prompting our endogenous morphine to kick in. As if our chief activity as humans were to produce pain and then to produce painkillers. 

Reading Fleur Jaeggy is a bit like that. She produces, describes, pain, and the bluntness and swiftness of her style is the painkiller. 

Actually, as I began the title story of I am the brother of XX, I was relieved rather than pained that without ceremony we were plunged into the crosscurrents of family, that we took on the remoteness, the unwillingness, yet compulsion, the little you can say about it, the sense of release in saying even this much.

Most of Fleur Jaeggy's creatures are close to untimely death. Her sentences are short. You're left at the end of each one, abandoned, as she, the writer, we must suppose, was abandoned, obscurely and politely, in her upper middle class Swiss early life, without pathos or explanation.

Need to read a piece or two in Hortus to right the balance. 'I never tasted anything as good as an Ashmead's Kernel on a biodynamic farm near Stroud a few years ago.' We have an Ashmead's Kernel tree and the soft russety taste at this time of year is redemptive. 

Chez Fleur Jaeggy a lakeside calm in one story is the most redemption you find. There is very little eating. No apples at all that I can remember.