saturation
martinesque
by manjula martin
hi, it's me, yet another writer who neglected her newsletter for a while. what's new?
the last time i wrote you i was announcing a book deal; today i received copy edits on that same book manuscript, which exists now, it has cover art and a subtitle and a preorder link, all of whose effectiveness will likely require some more-public efforts by me at communicating in the coming months, so, hi.
if writing and publishing are two different moments in the arc of a book's life. i guess right now i'm in the shoulder season.
i have developed a tradition over the past year of writing this book (yes, a year is fast, for those wondering) in which every time i turn in a draft i get sick. chronic pain flares, stomach bugs, colds, it's such a fun tradition. this time it's an ear infection. i haven't had an ear infection since i was a child and it makes me feel like a child. the medicine i'm taking makes my stomach hurt, and the only things i want to ingest are ginger ale, crackers, and fig newtons.
more interestingly, the infection has made me lose a significant portion of my hearing. this is temporary, i'm told. at first it was just one side that was super muffled but now it's both sides. when Max calls my name from the other room i don't hear him. or if i do, i don't know from which direction he is calling. when i'm on the deck drinking my tea in the morning i don't hear the neighbor's power washer, a springtime benediction i'm happy to go without. i also don't hear the baby hummingbirds chirping in their nest or the migrating warbler of some sort whose looping dusk call i have been expecting every evening. a cancelled rendezvous. when i cook i don't hear anything sizzle or steam, i burn the onions. i can't really drive safely. in the shower today i felt the soft patter of water on my skin more keenly, because the sound isn't there. i cut myself while shaving my legs, dropped the razor, bent down to get it, and bumped my head on the grab-rail thingy. i don't see know if this clumsiness is directly related to my not being able to hear but perhaps it's something to do with balance, an off-kilter constancy, like a pinball-machine stuck permanently in tilt mode. the effect is a pervasive distortion of sense. the farawayness of sounds makes everything feel somehow thicker, cushioned, and so perhaps my body is drawn to bump up against everything, greeting the everpresent fuzz of the physical world through gesture instead of sound. the only word i have found to describe to myself what it sounds like inside my head is a visual one: blurry. colors are more saturated and less distinguishable, while sounds are both absent and new.
we had a blurry winter here in the western woods. you may have heard: it rained in California. here beneath the tall trees, the wind is our main antagonist. a few storms ago, a douglas fir tree fell on an a-frame house down the hill and bisected it perfectly, creating two new, smaller triangles the names of which i'd know if i could remember anything i learned in elementary school (other than sick-day snack preferences). the guy who lived in the house got out okay with his dog; the house is dead, a few weeks later another doug fir fell at the bottom of my steep, tiny street and when i ventured outside to see what that terrifying noise was, i looked down the hill and all i could see was green where pot-holed asphalt used to be. in my yard a widowmaker fell from a large redwood, they are named that for a reason, it took out a sparingly small notch out of the fence, a significant limb of the madrone tree, and what may have been the power line and may have been a phone line, then settled in as another road-block, smelling of green and fresh broken woodflesh. by the time this happened the power was already out. several neighbors had already left the woods to get hotels in town for the night. i got in the car, and went to meet Max at a bar. we came back at bedtime. the redwoods held.
this was long ago, in the dark of was it February or March?
now, the tall trees are upright again, and the sun too has finally grown tall enough to lean over their tops and into the garden. spires of lupines and unruly starbursts of columbines reach back toward it. the foxgloves stand two feet higher than me; more like wolf mittens. the roses keep stretching their necks and their crowns are decked out in new buds, but they haven't yet flushed. a few weeks ago the peonies grew so heavy that they bent over and their pink marshmallow-soft orbs now graze in the duff and mulch among the volunteer violets. the juvenile apple trees in the yard are finally looking more like trees than whips. there are a few clusters of tiny green fruit on the Wickson and the Grav, and the other trees have a few braces of European prune plums and Asian pears that look to me like jadeite glass decorations. but all the fruit trees here are still quite young, they need another year before they fruit fully.
i walk down the garden path and stumble because my balance is off. the rustle of the forest around me is absent from my inflamed senses. inside my eardrums there are sounds that might be compared to crickets, fox screams, rumbling waterfalls, freeways, but none of these are evident in the landscape. outside my body, all the colors appear very bright to me, and they have no shadows in the noon light. now is the season of whites and pinks, violets and blues. yesterday the peonies began to open: the white, delicate fried-egg ones; the near-garish pink; and, dramatically, the deep red ones whose name I don't know, they are a wine-dark-sea kind of red. epic and self-involved, and their hue is incongruous against the delicately tilting easter palette of the other early-season flowers.
peonies are ready to harvest when they are not quite unfurled, still a little ball of color covered in symbiotic ants. you're supposed to squeeze them gently and if they feel like a marshmallow, you can cut them and they'll open in the vase. in our garden we have a rule that the first bloom doesn't get cut. nor the first fruit. the second, you can take, but you should really give it away. the third one's all yours, but you have to ask the plant if it's ok.
plants do not talk. or at least, not in utterances i can hear with my ears, right now or ever. but usually you can tell if it's ok or not.
it will be another two seasons or so before you can read the book i wrote about my garden, the forest around it, the fire that is returning to this land, and my body in the middle of it all. but right now you can, and should, pre-order The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History this is not the last time i'll ask you to do so but it is the first, and as such, it doesn't get cut.
now reading: A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors; Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille Dungy; The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li
now watching: the 1995 Ang Lee/Emma Thompson film adaption of Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility, with English subtitles on
now listening: the viscous matter inside my own bod
all killer, no filler,
-m.
you're receiving this email because you know me, know my work, or might want to.