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.

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. 

 

WHAT READING DOES (FOR ME)

I could be reading Jhumpa Lahiri for the second time in the middle of the night, if reading is to be in someone else's life. 

In the morning I'm reading/weeding among young birch trees, pulling out the strangely satisfying square roots of field woundwort, yellow nettle roots ripping through the upper earth, new goosegrass, already confident, nascent perky ivy. 

At the end of the day I'll read the New Yorker in the bath. How much writers' archives go for even while they're alive.

Reading is the model. 

The day aligns.

Shirley Jackson & Guy Davenport up at the pond

Into the clear space left by reading Platonov, walks Shirley Jackson. We watched a film about her in which Shirley was played by a surly, slovenly Elizabeth Moss, and so I re-read We Have Always Lived in the Castle with her face in mind, her malicious demeanour. So childish you want to slap her. I wanted to get to the end of the book in order to get away from her. 

For our first pond day since — October? —  I read an article in the New Yorker about a singer whose sudden fame so knocked her sideways she went to Harvard to do a masters in divinity. 

For the second day, Guy Davenport, Ten Stories. All your curiosity focussed on the here and now. The socks going off, the icelandic jumper, too big, going on. 

In 'Belinda's World Tour', Kafka writes letters to Lizaveta from her doll Belinda, which she lost in the park, the first tragedy of her life.

Belinda did not have time to tell you herself. While you were not looking, she met a little boy her own age, perhaps a doll, perhaps a little boy, I couldn't quite tell, who invited her to go with him around the world. But he was leaving immediately. There was no time to dally. She had to make up her mind then and there. Such things happen. Dolls, you know, are born in department stores, and have a more advanced knowledge than those of us who are brought to houses by storks. We have such limited knowledge of things.

Belinda marries her abductor, Rudolf, yes, at Niagara Falls, and they are en route for the Argentine.

You must come visit our ranch. I will remember you forever. Mrs Rudolph Hapsburg und Porzelan (your Belinda). 

 

Entangled Reading, Part Two.

Up at the pond in our heatwave, here on the edge of europe, where heatwaves are like harvests, never quite the business, with the intention of reading some pages I wrote about my history of reading, how it came out and what it led to, and reading instead an article in the New Yorker about Making America Hungary Again, at a CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) meeting in Orlando, Florida, followed by another in Hungary. 

I swim now and then, fishing out clumps of parrotweed which have a curious warmth that all healthy predators give off. Then back to Victor Orbán and his useful friends, Finkelbach and O'Sullivan, to name but two, and still more useful enemies, like George Soros. 

It is a sad story of manipulation and contempt, the mythifying of nationhood in the face of oppression, real or endemic. A disturbing picture of what is going on when you think everything (Trumpish) has gone quiet.

My history of reading, rife with privacy and intimacy, with library books and french literature, is suddenly unreadable. 

I rescue a grasshopper from the pond — yesterday a bee. 

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.

The Umbrella, the New Yorker, Tove Ditlevsen

On a wet and windy afternoon six people made their way up our field towards the pine grove, where in a groundswell moment, they were proposing to lie down on the ground for ten minutes. Most of them were well kitted out with waterproofs and something to lie on, except the two youngest, who were dressed as usual and huddled as they walked under a pale and partly broken small umbrella.

I had just read Tove Ditlevsen's story 'The Umbrella' in the New Yorker. A girl in the nineteen thirties dreams of owning an umbrella. When she is ten she sees a pretty woman in a nearly floor length yellow dress holding a slim strong translucent umbrella as she crosses the courtyard. A headscarf and a sturdy shopping basket is all you need, her mother taught, and look for a man with brown hair and dark eyes. You do not need an umbrella. Is our skin so fragile we can't take a little weather? 

But Helga had never tried to put herself in another person's shoes; it had never been necessary. Her entire character consisted on a pile of memories without a pattern or a plan. There were a number of pairs of brown eyes, a twilight mood, an immense, undefined expectation, a yellow dress, and an umbrella.

Helga marries Egon and the days pass. He starts drinking and she raids the piggy bank.

The moon lit the little room like a false dawn. With the deftness of a thief, she counted the money. There were almost forty kroner. She held them in her hands, smiling gently, redeemed and alone, like a child smiling in her sleep. All she could think of was an open, translucent umbrella with a certain shape and colour. 

Egon breaks the umbrella over his knee. Helga's is passive when Egon tells her, over his shoulder, at the end of the story, 'You'll get another umbrella.' 

The two girls this afternoon, 13 and 16, had not dreamed of their umbrella nor its replacement. They went up to the pine grove and lay there for ten minutes on a wet and windy day and took photos up their nostrils and into the pines. 

Their umbrella is disposable. It is a dishonest headscarf, enfin, and a sturdy shopping basket, an immense, undefined expectation, just as in nineteen thirties Copenhagen. 

It made sense that the umbrella was ruined. She had set herself up against the secret law steering her inner world. Few people, even once in their lives, dare to make the inexpressible real.

Fugitive Reading

Yesterday on Howe's Strand, where some people were swimming in the cold sea & colder wind, was a black hole plumbed into a sleepless night. I read in the New Yorker about penobscot, a native american language, and the dictionary Frank Siebert compiled. By the time he had finished there were no fluent speakers of penobscot left. Carol Dana, a penobscot woman who had helped with the dictionary forty years earlier, was one of the last who spoke the language at all; and she was thinking of getting a parrot in order to have someone to talk to. 

The dictionary reigned over a vanished world. There was no english to penobscot section. But if you had something to go on, like, for example, the penobscot for canoe: that which flows lightly upon the water, and: butter is milk grease, lunch is noon eat. Once you learn how to bring your fractious world down to its simplest items: a flower is something bursting forth into the light. Once you retrieve the elements of your life, you can speak penobscot without a dictionary.

I read at arm's length, wanting to sleep but not being warm or cosy enough. A boy not far away on the beach was reading a book; I couldn't see the title. He was one of the ones who braved it into the cold sea.

The World Turned Upside Down

A review in The New Yorker of a book about Mao's China plunged me into an ancient sense of my own borders. In the early 1970s I told Anouar Abdel-Malek, sociologist, how I had no sense of history, and he was appalled; or otherwise frustrated. The following year I told him about the day I stopped on a drive from the Fishguard ferry to Norfolk, in a village on a fierce windy day like a woman in an entirely different, earlier novel. That wind is straight off the Urals said the woman in the shop. And history, like a shy alien, showed. 

I turned a corner in Hertfordshire and for a moment I had a sense of history. Unspecific as that, but a milestone. I bought an apple and drove on. Anouar was not impressed. I was an educated woman. But a lost cause. He gave me a piece of fabric his mother had given him, as if I'd become a woman of fabrics rather than ideas. I used it in the construction of a box for a book about Cuba.  

I work my way, as a gardener does, through the article, China and Russia and the great movement of ideas and sorry outcomes, often as not. The way once I listened to my political, passionate, fully exercised fellow students. 

There is understanding and there is recognition.  These days  'History is irony on the move.' (E.M. Cioran) I haven't read Marx and a glance at Mao on poetry in 1968 was enough. Now I read that China has managed to postpone the end of history, and I am at the same blockage as back then. Visceral and inarticulate. Like the wind off the Urals.   

Tony Judt comes in towards the end of the review. New Yorker reviews and articles have this moment where they draw breath and you know you're about a page from the end. Then they bring in a new voice. 

In 2010 Tony Judt warned, not long before his death, that the traditional way of doing politics in the West—through "mass movements, communities organised around an ideology, even religious or political ideas,'—had become dangerously extinct. There were, Judt wrote, "no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself."

Silone and Sebald tango, Elizabeth Strout

First swim in the pond. Counting whirligig beetles, betimes, reading W.G. Sebald, A Place in the Country, his series of essays on writers he loves and the places that gave them reverie. Antidote to my previous read, Fontamara by Ignazio Silone, born Secondino Tranquilli, who, under his original  name and in easier times, would perhaps have liked the innerness of Sebald, or, to keep the chronology plausible, Sebald's much-loved Robert Walser.

The peasants of Fontamara, a barely fictional village in southern Italy in the 1930s, mostly cannot read at all. The literate, by the end of the book, after some surreal and helpless battles with unknowable powers, come up with a title for a local bulletin: What are we to do? Fontamara was distributed along Italian soldiers in World War Two to bolster a sense of purpose in the fight against fascism.

Fontamara is a 1938 Penguin book, serious orange cover, plenty of listings of new important Penguins and Pelicans and Specials at the back. I have had it since I was a teenager. It was a marker of leftist edginess, the politics I absorbed rather than understood when I was growing up.

I like to tango my reading at the best of times. Silone and Sebald do not exactly dance together. Silone has a purpose, even when dancing. Sebald, especially when he is writing about Robert Walser, finds joyful contemplative detour sentences and goes along with them as they scuttle away under our gaze like millipedes.

Walser must at the time have hoped, through writing, to be able to escape the shadows which lay over his life from the beginning, and whose lengthening he anticipates at an early age, transforming them on the page from something very dense to something almost weightless. His ideal was to overcome the force of gravity.

In these plague times we need to organise our reading, for variety, contradiction and sheer randomness. I have moved from Elizabeth Strout's small town Maine; to American Peace Corps in China, 1990, in a New Yorker articles; to the exploitation of peasants in southern Italy in the 1930s; to the calm and glorious sentences of W.G. Sebald.

Someone in the Irish Times suggested Montaigne's 'On Solitude', and I thought: good.

Gucci, Mallarmé, New Yorker

Read of the week was a Gucci ad on the back of the New Yorker. Straight to the point. In french.

Droit au but, les revers voient grand.  

The point is out of sight, beyond a pair of wide, white lapels on black silk and wool. Mallarmé would write like this in 2019.

Vous ne risquer pas de manquer votre entrée en optant pour cette veste de smoking croisée noire 

en cady de soie et laine.

Mallarmé wrote and produced a fashion magazine called La Dernière Mode at the end of the nineteenth century, a poet on sabbatical among women's clothes, compiling his sentient dictionary, his gamut of suggestion.

Et l'on n'est pas au bout de ses surprises, puisque 

l'ensemble se complète d'un casque en feutre noir à visière jaune transparente

The less you understand the more

The better the entrance you make

Say nothing and you fascinate

By the reach of your lapels

You are transparent and 

Still you have secrets

Perfect

Your visor tinted

Spastic in stance

You strike a pose

Of antic Egyptian

You play your role

As you understand it

As we understand you

To understand it in this costume

Jouez votre rôle comme vous l'entendez

Han Ong, Johann Peter Hebel, Clarice Lispector, Cronicas

At the end of a story about a reclusive, ageing painter and a young Mexican boy, we can, if we like, go to the New Yorker website to hear what the author, Han Ong, has to say about 'straying into topicality'. The Mexican boy and his mother and her friends in his story are caught up in the trumpian anti-immigrant scourge. The artist paints and repaints stripes, then burns them, as if saving all her feelings, eventually, for the Mexicans.

I have also been reading The Treasure Chest by Johann Peter Hebel, from about two hundred years ago, a collection of short, sane, family friend moral tales he wrote for almanacs—the one book other than a bible that you might expect to find in almost every (rural) home in the early nineteenth century. In an almanac you could find the complete underpinning of the year ahead: full moons, high tides, the farming seasons, the structure of labour and festivals.

Something clean and reassuring about both these ventures; not brave but normal. Johann Peter Hebel's stories do not stray into topicality. They live there. There was a new almanac every year, unlike the Bible, which was for good. A house would have a Bible and an Almanac in the early nineteenth century; now an internet connection and an Ikea catalogue, perhaps.

In the 1960s and 1970s Clarice Lispector published Cronicas, week by week, in a Brazilian newspaper. A hundred and fifty years later, topicality has moved into anecdote. The focus is up close: how long you should wait after seabathing to wash off the salt, for example, or, advice on how to treat one's possessions.

There is a creature living inside me as if he were at home, and he is. He is a black horse with a shiny coat and although completely wild—for he has never lived inside anyone before nor ever been saddled—although completely wild, this gives him the primitive sweetness of a creature without fear.

Erasmus saw a piece of paper in the street in the fifteenth century and picked it up to see what was written on it. 

Are we using our life or not when we fritter it away? What precisely am I trying to find out?

Edward Gorey, Richard Avedon

For some weeks now a copy of the New Yorker in my room has been open at a photograph by Richard Avedon of Edward Gorey with a ginger cat around his neck, both of them looking downward into the dark of Mr Gorey's jumper, his beard and the cat's fur of a piece in black and white.

I found Edward Gorey in the Gotham Book Mart in 1980, his books, I mean. I was nosing about New York, pausing as I saw fit. The Gotham Book Mart, the Thalia cinema, Books & Co, another bookshop uptown, a record shop in Soho. Unaware that what I was doing was what people did in New York. I was walking, faster than I wanted, up and along New York streets, trying to find that natural, absorbing signs and untaken opportunities for services like full immersion tanks, reading advertisements of wares, considering displays of Chinese aluminium and perspex. 'I always wanted to look like this and now I do', said a young woman photographed in Soho around then. Not me. I had no idea I might look like this or what it was I always wanted.

Edward Gorey was also a shy man, nosing about in the Edwardian mode, privately having a laugh in the manner of Edward Lear and others. The era of Edward, indeed. The New Yorker article concerns a recent biography of Edward Gorey. Why read about the life of someone who created lives, in words and drawings, and was indifferent to his own? Like reading about a cousin you didn't know you had. Edward Gorey was a precocious child. Later, when asked about his sexuality, he said he supposed he was gay. He went to a lot of movies and was passionate about New York City Ballet. What more do we need to know?

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

'I am nourishing a creature' wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley, who nourished in her turn another, nameless, unnamed, unnameable creature, male, larger than life, like Byron silhouetted against mountain peaks, but vulnerable.

What do any do but digest as best they can? Mary Shelley had a mother, a father, a husband and a poet silhouetted against mountain peaks to digest through her own pregnancy and birth into Frankenstein and his monster.

The looming man, vessel of my early adolescent dreams. I dreamed him behind me and I couldn't move, in the lane out the back beside the Baptist Church.

For two hundred years the vessel of the monster fills, empties, refills with our terrors, our mothers, our fathers, our gullies, our peaks, our disguises. Jill Lepore in The New Yorker made me re-read Frankenstein then wonder if I'd ever read it at all, if you could be whacked the same way twice. It could have been one of those books you absorb without reading, like Moby Dick or Proust.

But the politics of "Frankenstein" are as intricate as its structure of stories nested like Russian dolls. The outermost doll is a set of letters from an English adventurer to his sister, recounting his Arctic expedition and his meeting with the strange, emaciated, haunted Victor Frankenstein. Within the adventurer's account, Frankenstein tells the story of his fateful experiment, which has led him to pursue his creature to the ends of the earth. And within Frankenstein's story lies the tale told by the creature himself, the littlest, innermost Russian doll: the baby.

 What does the baby sound like? Is he crying? Yes.

The reader makes free with Frankenstein and his monster, digests as s/he will, confounding Frankenstein and his monster, fear with adventure, love with loss, innocence with corruption. In common with our collage/assemblage habit two hundred years on, Mary Shelley pulls in all she knows from her innermost doll to her father's and her husband's and his friends' science, gothic and romance. This is who she is at the time she is writing, which is also the time when she is producing creatures herself, who die, and cry. 'Awake and find no baby', she wrote in her diary.

For the first theatrical production of "Frankenstein," staged in London in 1823, (by which time the author had given birth to four children, buried three, and lost another unnamed baby to a miscarriage so severe that she nearly died of bleeding that stopped only when her husband had her sit on ice), the monster was listed on the playbill as "–––––".

Reading without reading

Lately I have been reading without reading. What's that in Finnish? The Finnish abessive case is for things that aren't there, for doing things without doing them. In generous, egalitarian, Scandinavian manner, reading without reading focusses on the book being without a reader despite the appearance of one, rather than on the reader's helpless inattention. Either way, I have been reading without reading in this uncertain August weather. I have chosen books and held them up and turned a few pages. I have noticed sentences and then lost them, in Henry Green and Karel Čapek, in The New Yorker and Hortus. Menus and tattoos. Quickies in the The Guardian Weekly. I have scooped remarks from long ago diaries and then dropped the book on the floor, unable to take a word more. Those metaphors; their reach ever more diaphanous.

Polichinelle cache à la foule curieuse le fil conducteur de son bras.

I have not, at the moment, the generosity that reading needs. Or the needs that reading generates. Or the generous reads I need. Or the reads I dreamed. The dreams generated. I lose my red jumper out of a car. My teeth fall out in quantity yet in my mouth there are none missing.

I read in The New Yorker about the artist, Thomas Thwaites, who got a Wellcome Trust grant to learn how to be a goat, and his fellow-traveller who at the same time was learning badger. This was in England. It would be poignant anywhere, once you get into the nitty-gritty of prosthetic goat legs and a goat digestive system, or when the badger sett is riddled with worms after heavy rain. You have to take radical measures to get away from the ravages, the absurdity, of human life.

Thomas Thwaites spent time with goats, practised with his prosthetic legs, read Heidegger, learned to react to his surroundings in a goatlike way. He would have achieved goathood, he thought, when he could see a word without reading it (I'd like to try that), or look at a chair without thinking about sitting on it, or, more important, look at a goat and think of it as another person, like him.

David Garnett's Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo from 1922 and 1924, Bloomsbury, explored similar preoccupations, from the point of view of the human trying to hang on to his humanness. David Garnett makes much slower and sadder, fraught progress towards foxhood. One day Mr Tebrick looks round and sees that Mrs Tebrick has turned into a vixen, just like that, complete, no Heidegger, no prosthetics, only suspension of disbelief. He remains in love with his vixen, with his Sylvia, at first he dresses her and plays cards with her, later he's horrified when she kills and devours a rabbit, and jealous when she produces cubs. She has prostituted herself with a fox. How is he going to deal with that? It is only near the end of the tale that he finds his way past his horror of, guilt at, desire for, the bestial.

At that moment all human customs and institutions seemed to him nothing but folly, 'for said he, 'I would exchange all my life as a man for my happiness now, and even now I retain almost all of the ridiculous conceptions of a man. The beasts are happier and I will deserve that happiness as best I can.

David Garnett, known as Bunny, was calming a private mind here. Men sin because they cannot be animals, he concludes. There is always something to overcome, even in Bloomsbury. His man in a zoo, labelled and on show, is another species, mauled by an orang-utan, befriended by a caracal. Tilda Swinton on show in the Serpentine, asleep, is somehow comparable. A zoo, a gallery, an audience.

David Garnett is labouring compared with Thomas Thwaites, who is, according to the subtitle of the book he wrote about being a goat, on holiday from being human. The 21st century manifests a refreshing directness in the face of lunacy. After talking to a shaman about animism and totemism, he concludes

Really, to want to become a goat is pretty standard. In fact, historically speaking it's almost odder to not want to become a goat.

There's a volume to be written on the reading you do out of nervousness, displacement, anxiety or inability to sleep; minor and major attempts to secure an anchor at times when reading is for some reason impossible, as when the weather has turned autumnal and your principal reading place in the attic is shaken by hammer blows from the lads re-roofing the house, singing their way through heavy showers, bless them.

Reading is not the word. Devouring the medium in which you immerse yourself. Searching through old New Yorkers for stories you haven't read, or have read but forgotten, racing to the finish as if this completion would transfer to the day, or the night, or the storm, or the roof. Reading on the sofa downstairs with the cat, hoping for a nap; in the middle of the night in the distracted, tricksy search for sleep; in the bath, a steamy, enclosed story of, as it often is in the New Yorker, marital distress or juvenile delirium; on the train, forswearing the company of strangers and the view out of the window for a tale, written up in Hortus, of tulip hunters in the 'Stans, anticipating their species, eating their mutton stew, for their cries of delight when tulipa whateveriensis heaves and flutters into view on a chilly Spring hillside in Turkmenistan.