DAILY LIVING

When I sit in a café I sit in the lineage of all other cafés I have known. I should sit at least once a week in the quiet season, as it is now, and read Gertrude Stein on Paris France. Her plain speech clears the raddled head like a large glass of very fresh cool water. I don't think Gertrude Stein was ever raddled.

The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living. Life is tradition and human nature. 

 And so in the beginning of the twentieth century when a new way had to be found naturally they needed France.

Really not, french people really do not believe that anything is important except daily living and ground that gives it to them and defending themselves from the enemy. Government has no importance except insofar as it does that.

Gertrude is perhaps, in her time, in her freshness, what my friend Pete Lyle calls haute fuck. It was 1940 and she was able to say Paris was exciting and peaceful. She had lived there since 1903.

As the rain pours down for the first time in months I am fully doused in what the ground gives to me. It takes a pot of gold to raise a rainbow, as Randolph Healy says; maybe have a shot / at a language with no present or future. I open The best of (what's left of) Heaven by Mairead Byrne a time or two in the day. —Quiet, I know what it is. It is a human hand.

At night I've been reading Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse. So much plot and impersonation and machination you cease to care who is doing what to whom, and ride a chapter or two in the early hours.

When you get to know Pongo better, said Lord Ickenham, you will realize that he is always like this — moody, sombre, full of doubts and misgivings. Shakespeare drew Hamlet from him. You will feel better, my boy, when you have had a drink. Let us nip round to my club and get a swift one. 

Maggie Nelson On Freedom, Judith Thurman On Dante, Translation,

Maggie Nelson On Freedom, Four Songs of Care and Constraint, is a ghostly read at the start of autumn. Maybe I would rather she was Anne Carson, or Rimbaud. I read Maggie Nelson, sometimes too fast, as the poem that spreads underneath, as mycelium spreads underneath the earth.

But the fact remains that no one can ferret out for us which pleasures are taken in an "experience without truth" (Derrida), and which can have truth-value (or something otherwise worthwhile); no one can figure out for us which modes of abandonment are wonderful, and which do damage (or more damage than they're worth); no one can determine for us when a strategy of liberation has flipped into a form of entrapment. As the slogan May you be blessed with a slow recovery suggests, such proximities constitute a knot that benefits from patient, perhaps even lifelong, untangling. 

Meanwhile, in The New Yorker, Judith Thurman has been reading Dante and new Dante translations of Purgatorio, which are, she feels, are very good in a pandemic. This year is the 700th anniversary of Dante's death. There have been more than a hundred translations of the Divine Comedy. I have three of them. That is already strange in today's world. Where we drown in world views and the freedom to pass judgement in public.   

Many branches of radical ecological thinking edge into this territory, insofar as  grappling with systemic threats to the biosphere as we know it often demands a kind of zoomed-out perspective on humanity and planet that can prompt deeply unnerving paradigm shifts and proposals. ...  Our method of inhabiting the planet could be otherwise. Our attitude toward death, including our own deaths or that of our species, could be otherwise.

Maggie Nelson On Freedom is not translating Purgatorio. Or maybe she is. Purgatory was a recent invention, a middle child of three, between Inferno and Paradiso. Purgatory takes place on this Earth, not above or below. Here. Now. Grazing the meadow. Playing at trains in L.A. Reprieved. 

The Maggie Nelson poem I was trying to find underneath her four songs of care and constraint is the poem of the exorbitant reader and the anxious human. I haven't read what she has read, but I have read as she reads.  

Such is the approach taken in the pages that follow, in which "freedom" acts as a reusable train ticket, marked or perforated by the many stations, hands and vessels through which it passes. (I borrow this metaphor from Wayne Koestenbaum, who once used it to describe "the way a word, or a set of words, permutates" in the work of Gertrude Stein. "What the word means is none of your business," Koestenbaum writes, "but it is indubitably your business where the word travels.")

 

The pond life of Gertrude Stein

Reading Ida by Gertrude Stein up at the pond, watching pond skaters, whirligig beetles and today's hawker dragonflies in their stop/start survey of our locale. Inexplicable compelling movements by insects and sentences alike in their nearly industrial rhythm. Ida is everywhere with her husbands and dogs and translocation of a kind that sentences do so much better than life. No wonder Ida spends her life resting. 

Gertrude Stein makes you feel the world has got stuck on its way around but that getting stuck is comfortable as well as the only way to be. She is of the era of Fritz Lang's M, the start of robotics. After railways, cars and planes and multiple viewpoints, staccato rhythms, narrative suspended. 

A pond can work wonders reading Gertrude Stein, watching the movements of insects and observing them when they come up close, their brilliant spots and stripes, their compound eyes, is an exercise in integration. Immediate crossover of sentences to insect movement. The dancing flies have gone, bring on the pond skaters.

Listen to me I, I am a spider, you must not mistake me for the sky, the sky read at night is a sailor's delight, the sky in the morning is a sailor's warning, you must not mistake me for the sky, I am I, I am a spider and in the morning any morning I bring sadness and mourning and at night if they see me at night I bring them delight, do not mistake me for the sky, not I, do not mistake me for a dog who howls at night and causes no delight, a dog says the moonlight makes  him go mad with desire to bring sorrow to any one sorrow and sadness, the dog says the night brings madness and grief, but the spider says I, I am a spider ...

 

Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon, Part the First,

Up at the pond in the not quite sun, reading sentences, and sentences about sentences that summon the reading places I have been in all my life, riveted, as by the whirligig beetles, and the strangeness of this warmth without sun, faltering but going on, like the sentences. Reading, is not quite the word. Sailing, maybe. Climb on board and make your way at the stem. Read another sentence. Less a sentence than a pond, a lake, a sea, a storm, a wind from other planets blowing.

Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon is a book for a summer: 27 sentences played and replayed in the light of all the reading in the world. 

How do you choose your 27 from so many. I used to give a lecture about sentences that had stopped me in my tracks, and led me on. I began with the Bible, then Robert Musil, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf, Beckett.  Brian Dillon starts with Shakespeare, John Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas de Quincey, Charlotte Brontë. Chronological order is the most peaceful.

Sentence no. 28 is the one he wrote to start the book: a page and a half sentence on the subject of sentences. You are on board so you continue, held together by punctuation and bated breath, by whirligig beetles. And later, a movement of a Schubert quartet. A sentence of another kind. A Quartettsatz. In C minor.

Sentences that have folded you in, or let you ride, or removed you from your day exactly as much as you wanted? All along you thought you were an orphan and suddenly you have frères et soeurs massed together on the page, for about as long as it takes Schubert to change from major to minor. Painful; welcome; tortuous and violent.

I was pleased to get to Gertrude Stein. Her sentences fold you in, take you in hand. She is intimate and triumphant. Language is her armour and her sport.  

Sickness is Brian Dillon's default resting place. His sentence from Virginia Woolf, which he has copied out more than any other, is 181 words leading deeper and deeper into the state of illness. In this culture of wellness, illness deserves a voice. Without illness there is no wellness: Discuss. 

The Virginia Woolf sentence I chose was from The Waves:

That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, or seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.   

Brian Dillon's Beckett sentence is also about sickness, injustice, medicine.

... that smile at the human condition as little to be extinguished by bombs as to be broadened by the elixirs of Burroughes and Welcome, — the smile deriding, among other things, the having and the not having, the giving and the taking, sickness and health.

I chose something more terse and symmetrical. 

 I have always liked arithmetic. It has paid me back in full. 

This pausing on sentences suits my style of reading. I like to find a place to rest, a place to stop reading. Much as I want to read, I also want to stop. I want to count the whirligig beetles again. 

Patricia Highsmith, Radclyffe Hall

In a classic winter week of rain and cold I read Patricia Highsmith's Carol and then The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, the first from 1952, the second from 1928, 300 pages and 500 pages. It was hard to read Radclyffe Hall after the crispness of Patricia Highsmith. Carol starts straight in from the crucial encounter. The Well of Loneliness begins before birth, as it would. The description of the splendid birthplace and, for a while, perfect parents, is wearisome, verbose, tripping over itself in its desire to emphasise—the charms of nature, the intelligence of a beloved horse, etc.

I read too fast, not really reading, only skimming, impatient, then after a few chapters I have taken on her style and settled in. It is pleasing to read too fast sometimes, disrespectfully, in winter, when maybe you're not feeling great, one lesbian novel leading to another, an exercise in comparison as well as an indulgence in a taste I used to have for long novels mostly written by women in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Patricia Highsmith is so good at human chill in her thrillers, how does a romance turn out of her typewriter. There are thriller touches like a hidden, unsent letter, a detective who follows the couple on their road trip, but how startling when the writer so understanding of the psychopathic mind writes the sudden unfurling of passion.

And now it was pale blue distance and space, an expanding space in which she took flight suddenly like a long arrow. The arrow seemed to cross an impossibly wide abyss with ease, seemed to arc on and on in space, and not quite stop. .... 'My angel,' Carol said. 'Flung out of space.'

It is one of the charms of invention that a couple who recognize their reciprocity can occupy the same metaphorical and physical space.

Radclyffe Hall, on the other hand, is less adept. Her protagonist, Stephen Gordon (her parents wanted a boy), is always in charge of the language. She is also richer than her adoptees, especially the last and most protectable, Mary Llewellen. Stephen is always described as tall and lithe and physically powerful. We have more sense of the horse called Raftery and the swan called Peter as independent creatures with whom conversations can be had, than we have of Mary, or any of the other friends and love-interests in the book.

Both books have surprising minor moments. The young woman in Carol learns to drive with her lover over a week or so and after that, without further ado, participates in the driving on the trip. Stephen and Mary in The Well of Loneliness take a boat after the first world war from Southampton to Tenerife for a holiday. No flygskam (flight shaming) in 1919. The ménage they set up in Paris, in an old house with a garden in the rue Jacob, not far from (inspired by?) Gertrude Stein in the rue de Fleurus in the same era. Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall. What a pair. Did they ever meet?

One-Straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka

One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka

I started reading before a trip to London and finished when I came back, by which time our autumnal eco-patch and any sympathetic reading I might do in that direction were rendered even more poignant by the disastrous turn in American politics. Behind such noisy manipulation it's hard to hear yourself think.

Autumn sunlight through
such leaves as remain a sad—
ness unrequited

Fukuoka did not deviate from his way of farming, or his way of living, which were one and the same: no ploughing, no fertilising, no machines at all, growing crops as wild plants among other wild plants, living off his produce, knowing his trees and his plants, buying only soy sauce and vegetable oil; no wonder he lived to the age of 95.

Looming behind such lucidity and humaneness, is the agro-petro-chemical dependency machine that makes the farmer busier, the CEOs richer and the politics noisier. Better to have zero chemicals, zero machinery, zero economic growth and a population of 100% farmers who, in the slack winter season have the leisure to write haikus, says Fukuoka. Under 5% of the Irish population are farmers. No statistics on how many write haikus, or sonnets.

People are the way their land and air is, as Gertrude Stein said.

Exactly what turns me towards Two Lives on a sullen day in January is as unknowable as humans will always be, however prolix our musing. The lives are those of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, weighed half a century later by Janet Malcolm in their complicated voices, their bad and unforgivable behaviours, with attendant Gertrude obsessives and Alice sympathisers all tight in their chairs, holding onto their manuscripts before the memory of large, warm-faced, egomaniacal Gertrude.

There is, as Janet Malcolm observes, no Gertrude Stein school of writers. She may not have a school, (whew), but many have passed through, often without finishing the book, and come out altered. In Everybody's Autobiography, the book that followed the much more popular Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, 'she reverts to her old way of writing as if the reader were an uninvited guest arriving on the wrong night at a dark house'. To make your way through The Making of Americans, all close-spaced 900 pages of it, by cutting it up into sections with a kitchen knife, as Janet Malcolm did, is the behaviour of an assailant, not a guest, invited or otherwise.

I have always liked writing that repels. My years with Mallarmé attest to this. You look at this language and you almost have to fight it off even as you press on, but you don't forget it. And one day you go back for another look. Gertrude Stein always repays another look, however short, she overwhelms in minutes. Alice Toklas over there, hiding in her chair. The soft, irregularly cut pages of this Yale University Press edition hold giant egos and suppressed rage tenderly.

In the sun, late in the day, up at the pond, idling about in Tender Buttons. I'd forgotten how persistent Gertrude Stein is, how elegant and recalcitrant. Her buttons are inscrutable, their tenderness elusive. You've no idea why they fasten together like this, but with the sun on her Objects Food and Rooms, you wish her bonne route. If she sees things this way, if this puts a shine on her breakfast, bless her.

I can stay with tender buttons only about ten minutes at a time, then I need to close my eyes and open them to water boatmen pursuing their own ends in the pond.