Meaning of Life
Forget, and then remember again
I describe the last year or so as a great taking on, as though I am a sponge, just as Mum described me when I turned twenty-one. Twenty-one years later, as I ready to welcome my meaning-of-life birthday, the sensation is that of catching myself on the way back, as though I've been out on some promontory and am carefully picking my steps to reach safer ground.
Re-encounter is not new to my life. Six years ago, I declared myself a squirrel for the frequency with which I forgot where I'd buried my nuts (for nuts, read any creative project, collection of writing, quotidian practices, interests). My heart, I've discovered recently, is also squirrelish, going ten to the dozen, which often leads to exhaustion for the near constant sensation of stimulation, excitement and sometimes chaos. This fact was not least among the considerations to leave London and seek a quieter and slower life. I'm now by the sea, and the sea has an uncanny ability to put everything in perspective. Even on days ferociously stormy, the immensity of the sea has a calming effect, is a comfort.
Maggie Nelson knows about the inconstancy of memory:
Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again.
This is from The Argonauts. A re-read is an unusual choice for me - I don't go back often, and revisiting the old seems anathema to the spirit of the new year - but I picked it up hoping it would yield a long-lost treasure. It has yielded many. Reading it the first time was a formative experience - and this I can say confidently these years hence. Re-reading it, I am face-to-face with so many of my own 'rules to live by', which I had not attributed to this book.
One of the beautiful things about the book - that felt novel at the time - was the seamlessness with which Maggie employed the words of others. In the body of the text, names of sources called out unobtrusively in the margin. Maggie is almost ventriloquist, or at least is unashamed about crafting arguments and propositions by building on others' work. This concept - a scaffold we use to build the vessel of the self, into which we pour the thoughts of others - is not least of the book's lasting legacy. I am, after all, nothing more than a thickening of all the ingredients I've 'put in my pot' (this week alone, that is: Woven, Sir; Neil Turpin's albums; Anne Carson's lecture 'Corners'; The Beauty of the Husband; Stag's Leap; Eros the Bittersweet; to say nothing of voicenotes and texts shared with my beloved e). It is not only reading The Argonauts then that prepared me to read The Argonauts now, but all the queer theory, fluid forms and 'marginal' texts that I've read since then, too.
I want to be clear here: the experience of reading the book is not a simple remembering of things previously read and subsequently forgotten. There is evidence of an absorption, a taking on of ideas so deeply that I could no longer tell they weren't mine to begin with. This happened, reflected, earlier in the year. Mum and Dad started reading How To Paint A Dead Man on my recommendation. I begged, on a visit, to read them the second chapter. On finishing, Dad remarked on the obvious pleasure I'd had reading the italian names. And Mum said, that's you. Everything the painter thinks about the great gift of solitude is what you think. When she'd tried to read it a decade earlier, she hadn't been able to connect with it, nor could she imagine my reasons for recommending it. But now it seemed clear.
Reading is a becoming. We form ourselves on all the things we experience and engage with, books not least. In books, it is possible to turn our heads and see the breadcrumbs that lead us here. Reading something that potently describes one's interiority - an interiority perhaps hitherto not verbalised - provides permission to bring those philosophies, those propensities, that self, into the light of day. The books we read, the good ones, we keep reading even after the final page, until we can no longer distinguish ourselves from the text. Georges Poulet:
...take a book, and you will find it offering, opening itself. It is this openness of a book which I find so moving. A book is not walled-up as a fortress. It asks nothing better than to exist outside itself, or let you exist in it. In short, the extraordinary fact of a book is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it, it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside.
Thin envelopes
In 2020, I became acquainted with the work of Bruno Latour. That spring, I shelved all the books I hadn't read so that their spines were not visible. I wanted to reclaim some of the time spent choosing a book for, well, reading. Latour's lectures in Facing Gaia were the first texts up for debate in a salon on 'Pluriversal thought'. Meeting for an unbounded conversation about what Latour was driving at, in a warehouse apartment in East Oakland, was thrilling. Before our second meeting, the shelter at home order came from Governor Newsom.
The debate we'd left hanging centred on Latour's thin envelopes - his assertion that life contains 'non organised impacting entities', meaning the thresholds for life are miniscule in the grand galactic scheme of things, because there's neither order nor design in the systems supporting life. Life seems so unlikely.
The sentiment is echoed in the thoughts of a character in Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman. An ethnologist, tasked with assessing whether creatures are intelligent, and therefore make it to the list of species that companies must expend extinction credits to annihilate muses:
...evolution had not only wound its way toward this weird, snaggly, marginal way of life - so many options and you chose this one? - but held on to it, continued to sharpen and perfect it, until it was no longer marginal but was in fact a triumph, a raison d'etre for a whole species. An astonishing story, now ended.
Life holds on, with the narrowest of margins.
Time seems on perpetual collapse - the part of my brain making associations between one experience and the next has somehow lost any sense of time. It seems like yesterday that I last intended to see Marina Abramović at the Serpentine. It is 15 years since she was there. This time, at the Royal Academy of Art, I did see her show.
In one video piece, Marina's profile is closely framed. We can see the ocean behind her, forming waves, but we cannot tell how far away it is. All depth is collapsed. For each wave I saw forming, I thought, this is it, this is the big one. She's going to be inundated. Now and again, the water would indeed reach her, gently knocking her face toward the camera and then coaxing her head back as the water receded. The thin envelope that formed the aperture for witnessing this performance amplified both my sense of jeopardy and incredulity, though I saw no real evidence of peril, still I expected it.
Abramović is undeniably mistress of this 'hanging in the balance', holding a viewer in taut expectation. The piece at MoMA in 2010, 'The Artist is Present', had Abramović sit opposite an audience member live. The two sat and gazed at one another without speaking for as long as the audience member wished - or could stand it. An engagement without predetermined end, much like those salons I missed.
The night before seeing the show, my friend Rob visited me for the final night in my London flat. I'd seen him play piano last in an empty church, just after a visit from the tuner. He played lots of centuries old music, then. It was a magnificent concert for one. In my London abode, he warmed up on the upright again with some old music, and then with some jazz piano, and - suitably limbered - he then turned on his recorder and started improvising.
The improvisation was seventeen minutes long, though neither of us could have guessed. My sense of unease increased as the improvisation progressed, each note seeming to burst into the air and thicken there, until the music seemed so loud, and my heart beat so fast that I started worrying I'd have to ask him to stop. Knowing my flatmate was dog-tired in another room, knowing my upstairs neighbours were in, knowing the recorder was on... these facts became iron bars on a prison of tension, constraining the abandon I needed to be swept away on the unpredictable wave of music. It seemed to me an apt, aural depiction of why I'd felt the need to leave the flat and find freer ground. When looking for answers, everything seems relevant.
Six fake beards, five parkruns, four new second-person prose novels, three ringed-companions, two bedrooms and a solitary beach in Hvar
Reflecting on the passage of time is not complete without some mentions of highlights, for posterity. Special thank yous to:
- D, for a shoulder-to-shoulder introduction to Alice Neel, a very festive wander, and ending the night with a cheeseboard in a heavy metal bar. Only in Paris?
- B, for making it across the ocean and introducing me to punchdrunk via Mycenae and Troy; for recording all the outlandish laughter during cards against humanity, and for making me feel like part of the family.
- M, for many a night talking about books and art over a delicious curry, plus reacquainting me with my love of pool (we forget, and then remember).
- e, for a rich tapestry of encounters, real and digital, full of giggles, exclamations, tenderness and that oh so beautiful simultaneous nap on different couches.
- S, for a never-ending smiles, salsa, soggy hill walks, recording me reading an essay in front of an audience and introducing me to new parts of London and new parts of myself.
- A, for hospitality, a new four-legged friend, katerskill falls, adventures in paint, the voice of reason (when sober) and the voice of affection (when drunk).
- R, for also making it across the ocean and dosing me up on art, cake and lewd jokes about glory holes and young men. And before that, for telling me so much about his practice.
- P, for generosity as host and mate and not least for getting me to the ball (by which I mean wembley) for the follow on from making play-off history. Still haven't recovered. Come to think of it, maybe my heart problems started then...
- A&A, for many playdates in the unnameable office, where I tried a VR headset and had the benefit of tutelage on bass guitar; and for crowning my homemade granola.
- The Norwegian Bookclub crew, who continue to broaden my reading horizons and make my belly ache with laughter.
- The Family, whose appetite for fun and ability to care knows no bounds - and NOT TO FAIL TO MENTION the great treat we bestowed on Hebden Bridge by dressing up as characters from Life of Brian, giving chorus and cheer to all and sundry. I was Brian. No, I was Brian! No centurions or stoneings, happily.
Until next time, happy readings, meetings and highlight holdings
Bx