Bodies. Thinking a lot about them. Especially as I people watch on my winter walks. The clumps of friends in red and pink snowsuits, groups moving like birds, a man walking alone on the snow packed path at the edge of the lake taking a picture with his phone, a woman lets her dog off leash, and kids skate in Woodbine Park. All this while water precipitates into clouds at the horizon line. Water in many forms in one place—solid, liquid, gas. We are nature I chant to myself often. Ever since I experienced a mixed-media art installation at CCCB Barcelona in 2017 with Kim Stanley Robinson’s exhibition prologue, Think Of Yourself As the Planet, to an ominous track dubbed over videos of jellyfish, forests, pulsing waves, skyscrapers, computers and his words — “so when you’re talking about your planet, your talking about your body. And remember, a fever can kill you.”
I sat on the floor by myself watching this over and over before getting up to walk through the rest of the installation titled: After The End Of The World. My head was light and full. It was all very intense, somber. I wanted to do more than farm flowers, stupid flowers, and make arrangements for weddings, dumb love. I was going through a divorce. Everything felt urgent, immediate, and then I went and ate fish with a glass of white wine, alone and felt happy and guilty.
After reading the latest article in emergence this morning by Melanie Challenger (I’ve since added her book How To Be Animal to my reading list for this year. The list grows like a fungus), I listened to Infinite Universe by Beautiful Chorus. Their beat only in love through my ears. Then the ambient lull of Hibernate by Eskimotion. Thinking I should listen to these on mushrooms and not while drinking coffee. These contradictions live inside me.
Carmen Maria Machado also discusses bodies and what it means to be human in her genre-bending memoir In The Dream House. She looks at queer relationships and holds them up to a prism—within our own individual identities is our humanity—our propensity towards love and cruelty. She unpacks this through reflecting on her younger self, psychological abuse and a specific harrowing relationship in her adulthood. I’m only halfway through but I like her short flash nonfiction prose and see myself in her work despite our differences in experience.
My final MFA residency finished just over a week ago. Emotions moved as if I were a teenager again. I did a reading. This means I read an excerpt from my work in front of my classmates and faculty. The first time I did this I thought I was going to pass out. The more I do this doesn’t change my fears or the sweat which forms on my palms as I read, it only helps me remember I won’t die from reading my work aloud because I’ve done it a few times now and I haven’t died. This helps. My colleagues and faculty also say really profound and kinds things about my work. I tuck their comments into a folder on my laptop so I can read them when the critic gets loud —you’re have nothing to say. Why do you write these sad intimate stories about desire? You know nothing. You’re too serious, be funnier. You’re trying too hard, be easier. Your not doing enough, try harder. There are better writers just give up. Blogging is so early 2000s, there are cooler platforms now. Writing for free means you’re not a writer.
Something I think a great deal about lately is my boundary on the page. What I’m comfortable reading publicly, especially as a narrative nonfiction writer, and what I’m comfortable with people reading in the privacy of their own home. They are different. These boundaries. In the same way what I post on SM is different than here on this blog, is different from what goes into my newsletter (free fitful note for subscribers), is different from what’s in an email or text to a friend. I am learning about myself in this, the lines for my work. Letters between performance artist Marina Abramovic and writer Elena Ferrante discuss art in public and private in a much more articulate way than I can at the moment. Perhaps some of the most arresting ideas happen in the spaces between people, through inquiry and the unknown.
What I’m most proud of from our residency was how I pitched my story(ies) to the editor and agent I was paired with. We pitch our writing in person and this is unusual because normally it’s done in a letter, not face-to-face. Looking at someone in the eyes and sharing a work-in-progress is unnerving and vulnerable. I didn’t like it. Still, I did it. I didn’t try to cater to the marketability of my book for a particular press or agent, I stuck with the book I want to write, trusting it will find the right home, eventually. The exercise is mostly to learn about the publishing industry, to inquire further.
This morning I sit writing in our living room and looking out the West-facing window where the sun will set. In winter I can see the yellowish orb dip because the trees in our yard are only branches. Naked. The CN tower is visible on a clear day. When the sunbeams turn orange the scene looks like those crayon pictures I made as a kid. A layer of colour with a layer of black crayon on top and then scraping the wax until the colour pokes through past the dark silhouetted trees.
As I read the essay On Death and Love in emergence I thought of our space from two sides, the west window and the east window. How the light glows differently. There were many unformed formed thoughts, a reeling stream of consciousness and so I end with this because I want to. That’s the only reason really.
A space from two sides.
Sunday morning. Into evening. Grateful for this home. The light. A small world we’ve made here, especially as going into other spaces, being together socially, is still threatening. Catching up on some reading I like to call “research” to feel as though I am not procrastinating. Learning, again and again, about the evolution of humanity and how we think we’re the most important on the planet because consciousness only belongs to us and not the other animal bodies or sentient creatures or any other living thing. Learning about how the female body reminds us of mortality. More on this. Reading about death, actually Death, and reflecting on my own encounters with it, why we try to outrun it. On grief and how mine marks where I’ve loved and love, love love. Thinking on the adolescent Robin that died in my arms in the height of summer, a day after my 35 birthday, as a moving truck pulled away in the back alley. More on that too. Reading about destruction, apocalypse, holocaust, environmental collapse and still rationalizing, “but we are mostly good with a bent towards cruelty right?” And as I read the thoughts pass— I should unfollow people on Instagram to declutter my social media. What is for dinner? Should I put this on SM? Is my underwear inside out? This next to how it felt to hold the Robin, which let out a final breath…In.My.Arms. The silence after. Pure silence. The brain, which we still know so little about. My home, which I am attached to. All this on a Sunday morning.
Really though, Melanie Challenger’s essay on death is fascinating, moving, and eloquent. She knows things and articulates them beautifully.
Somehow this Death reading reminded me of going to church as a girl and then again as a young woman, the awareness of it always there with communion but then cushioned with ideas of an afterlife I could never quite cling to. The ignorance of the importance of the finiteness of life. Too many ofs in that last sentence. These words towards the end of the article hum the loudest now,
“perhaps it’s neither here nor there how we think about death. Perhaps the work that must be done is in how we think about life…perhaps we might place a little more faith in our bodies.”
And Kim Stanley Robinson’s words, “People are persistent. Life wants to live.”
So now that I have written this. Put words here. I’m getting back to life. Selecting seeds for my garden this week, hoping I’ll have enough to save for friends, planning the spring balcony, inviting neighbours over for drinks, finishing a school assignment, calling my parents to say hello, checking the mail for a gift from my sister, revising my manuscript, watching Ozark balanced with PEN15 and many winter walks.
Things to do if stuck indoors and feeling feverish:
buy a pastry, like a pistachio brioche or something small from a bakery nearby
get a coffee or tea-to go from your favourite café
walk outdoors and look at what you love in nature and then think about how you are also nature and beautiful too
watch the light change
hug a human in your bubble, a furry pet or if without another animal, a pillow and yourself
see if an art gallery is open near you, go and look at art with a mask on and really look at it while you feel your breath. I am going to view Anonymous Was A Woman this week with a friend. If there are no art galleries make something, even if it’s a doodle on the page of a book, a collage, a basket
dance, dance and more dance. Movement of any sort really. My classes have been stalled as anticipated so I’m moving and grooving in the living room.