Sludge Utopia

by Catherine Fatima

  Dark, from the copy of Theory of the Young-Girl on Paz’s shelf:

  The Young-Girl would be the being who no longer has any relation to herself except as a value, and whose every activity, in every detail, is directed to self-valorization. At each moment, she affirms herself as the sovereign subject of her power, all of the crushing assurance of this flattened being, woven exclusively by conventions, codes, and representations fleetingly in effect, all the authority that the least of her gestures indicates, all of this is immediately indexed to her absolute transparency to “society.” Precisely because of her nothingness, each of her judgments carries the imperative weight of the entire social order, and she knows it.

  There’s no better relationship than any relationship before its first putrefaction by renunciation. There’s nothing like the easy early purity before having to reaffirm what you earlier renounced in order to fuck again and everything that comes with all that. One thing I’ll never know, because Miles was here this summer, is how lonely, anxious, and far from myself I might have felt if he hadn’t been. If I do miss Miles in the next couple of weeks, it’ll be owed primarily to having so little to occupy me in the Açores.

  The editor I contacted did write to give me generic advice about rejection, and it was very kind. I told him I just wanted to be the one people trusted better than themselves, whom they considered wise, who set the standard of dominant style by my own work. Part of the advice (which he excused as patronizing) was, if I wanted to be published specifically at this magazine, I should read it and aim to resemble what it looked like. All this contemporary short fiction aims to make a barely altered life look either enviable or precious, and I can’t in good faith aim to do the same. My barely altered life must look just as it is: unremarkable, deniable. It cannot be presented as precious. There’s no mystery to whatever choice. They are each as easy to make as any other. Readers prefer description to theory. We all do what we can. I want to skip the step where I aim to resemble others so others can resemble me instead (in person, at least, friends tell me my way of speaking is infectious; but not all of them tell me this).

  Extreme ambivalence strengthens attachment, which has to be renewed upon an assent each time it’s renounced. Equal disposition to whatever should pass with a loved one allows for a relationship of total tranquility.

  But further, remember: with all intellectual flourishes neutralized as simply cutesy-quirky, all under God are available to be boyfriends!

  The extreme transparency of a seemingly comprehensible place makes radical contingency seem less threatening, or less real. I don’t think of Toronto this way. I don’t think of all the other lives I’d be living on a single decision alone. I feel I can see everything, and can therefore see what in everything doesn’t suit me. I foolishly believe that “no matter what,” I would have come to know my friends in Toronto at some time or another. As Paris is opaque to me, I can’t comprehend all those other lives and niches, so I know they are multiple, and I have ended up with the particular makeup of my own life due only to luck.

  The real tragedy of Toronto: we don’t own anything. We constantly have to move our things around between “lucky-find” apartments to keep up with the market. We have to give up all property to strangers, not our own community, in order to have the freedom to move our bodies around. The house in Île-St-Denis is owned; another, full of comrades, is owned just down the road; and by next month a group of them will be purchasing their third. You can’t own anything in Toronto, and neither can your friends. Your best hope is a storage locker, which will probably end up relocating somewhere where the rent is cheaper, too.

  Self-interest is but the apparent motive of the Young-Girl’s behaviour. In the act of selling herself, she is trying to acquit herself of herself, or at least have them acquit her. But this never happens.

  * * *

  The most idiotic, privileged, childish anxiety: “Will I continue to want this?” If you’re in a good mood, probably!

  It’s not true that I am equally disposed to any outcome with Miles. I’d prefer that he come to visit me in October, and maybe we take the weekend to visit comrades in Montreal, and then I go down to visit him during winter break. And, who knows: maybe everyone comes back to France next summer. I know he wants to. I think I’ll apply to teach in a high school in France through a program advertised in the French department each year. And then I could spend the summer here again. There is so much available to do.

  The thing that has to happen is that all my friends go in on a property where we can leave our books and mattresses and cook dinner together, and everyone is invited. And we make our own wine because it’s cheaper, and my grandparents can teach me. I know, I know. The demands of school are going to subject me to an experience of anxiety again, but it needn’t be significant. I feel calm and able. I feel like if I had a partner or security or any money, I’d be ready to have a kid. (One sees so many kids in France, and they’re energetic, social, and sweet. I see so few kids in Toronto, and they’re so often these little shits. I trust that in time this desire will leave me.)

  It’s true, and apocalyptic, that I think that to reproduce my life (have a child), I have to give up my life (take a job I don’t want, maybe a partner I don’t want, too, re-establish lines of contact with members of my family I don’t want to know, move somewhere difficult to access in order to have more space). In Toronto, it’s difficult to see any other reality as true. But, all over, there are different opportunities, different possible lives. I love coming to realize, each year, how much I want to raise a child. It makes me feel big and loving, like these breasts have some purpose more noble than vanity after all.

  When I believe that my own exceptionalism is the only way I’ll be able to live, of course I’ll fling between episodes of depression and mania, of course I’ll suspect myself of being perpetually unable to measure up to standards I seek out from every figure and institution. If I believe a full and pleasurable life is available regardless of how well I’m able to distinguish myself, then there’s less to propel me toward these emotionally debilitating states of being. You just work. You just continue. You fill your life with friendship. Everything’s good.

  I’ll be approaching the Spanish border in minutes, and the Portuguese border in hours. I see palm trees and mountains now. Salut.

  Family

  It’s perfect that my family really do live on and come from an island all their own. Metaphorically perfect. Narratively perfect. I never know what literally means in contemporary language, but in that respect probably perfect, too.

  Crashed last night. Exhausted, private, hungry feeling. Some hours walking through Lisbon but many more in the room I rented. Thought about 9/11 while plucking out pubic hair. We need these nights. You cannot reproach yourself for giving yourself these nights. I’m on a plane now leaving the European continent. On the Açores I would like to: jog every day, swim every day, eat plenty of fish, and translate Barthes on Fourier. In an hour I will be in my grandparents’ care. I have a tickle in my throat. No one could eat all the garlic and pepper in Pico.

  * * *

  Heavy rainfall and minimal construction has actually encouraged more plant life on Pico now than when I was last here. The air is perfect, though it smells occasionally like animal shit (if you’re near it). Figs larger and juicier than I’ve ever seen them. A problem Jameson writes about: if you achieve utopia, you might lose its spirit. It’s true that in Pico, there are minimal aesthetic and intellectual traditions. Who needs them. All anyone here dreamt of was acquiring some capital elsewhere to bring back to weatherproof their homes, and they did it. Everyone eats well, and while the men normally have manual jobs that work it off, the women are normally a bit fat. People are not habituated to shamefully eating snack foods in private. At least not during the summer, that I’ve witnessed.

  People here leave signs on their gardens, or near trees, saying, “Come eat.” Very Ede
nic. I took a picture of one such basket and a man came out of his house to chastise me for taking a picture instead of a tomato. And so I did take a tomato, and it was good.

  * * *

  To concern oneself first with the emotional and affective is still true philosophy. Loving better is the practical imperative of the hour. The inability to take others into our care is a primary fault of anyone I know, myself included. In the Açores, everyone knows how to welcome others, but oddly enough no one knows philosophy. Emotional enfeeblement is as bad as not knowing how a home is put together.

  * * *

  I’ve started to dream of Oreste again in the mornings. I know it isn’t really dreaming of him, the real man with his qualities. I’m just dreaming of sex again. I’m just cleansed of attachments, dreaming of the last body to present me with not just sex, but dissolution. All the ways I’ve been with bodies have presented the spectrum of what I know as sexual, but at the end of the tunnel is still dissolution. More sublime than sexual, containing sexuality in the abstract. So, when days or weeks or months have passed and I’ve forgotten relationships and bodies and people, my mind wanders toward the pure feeling of sexual dissolution, a memory of which is still produced with Oreste’s body as a sort of re-enactment hologram. Time will keep passing, and the vision of dissolution will continue to grow more abstract, and eventually it’ll have no face. I’ll just sleep in and have a feeling. It won’t remind me of anyone, not even abstractly. In that moment I’ll finally be present and free.

  Five Fs of securing lodgings: friendship, fucking, financial capital, family, political association?

  * * *

  Extremely calm trip each day together with family, nourished well and not thinking too much. And they certainly don’t either. Really it is my grandfather who is living the dream of wandering attention. His mind is like a vine: shallow and growing laterally between anything directly before him. But he’s kind! And he can build a fucking house. I’m never really alone here, but my grandmother is careful to give me space for something close to solitude. So careful, careful even to clean up after me and cook for me and do my laundry. Each physical need is taken care of such that it will be an adjustment to be responsible for myself again. It doesn’t suit me totally to be on a shared rhythm: at lunch, I eat when I am not yet hungry, and by the time dinner comes, I feel ravenous and eat too much. Constant socializing is a difficult demand. If I am to offer myself some way I’d prefer to do so in the kitchen, which I’m barred from so my grandmother may attend to all tasks with private precision. On the whole, I eat too much because every meal is followed by bread, cheese and fruit, and fruit brandy. I have sometimes been eating just at dinner what in Toronto would last me all day. So has everyone else! I’m walking lots, swimming, getting lots of sun. I feel healthy if plumping up slightly, and I’m very relieved that I’ll be leaving all this extreme generosity and leisure in five days. Yesterday, took a ferry to the island opposite ours and toured around it my grandparents, my great-aunt and uncle, and two second cousins. Both boys, Rafael, a teen, and Laudalino, twenty. Laudalino was the tour guide due to a gentle sexism that suits me because I benefit a great deal from being treated as a child here. That my mother’s cousins are younger than me perfectly fits in the strange age arrangement of the whole family: my parents ought to be my siblings, and my grandparents, spritely, are of an appropriate age to be my parents.

  In Faial, we visited the museum erected near the ruins of the town where my paternal grandmother was born, which was destroyed by a volcano in the fifties. When I last visited the site—when I was a child—you could still see the remains of many houses half-buried in the sand. Now you can see almost nothing, and healthy greenery grows from the sandy deposits that blanket the former town. In under twenty years, you can do more than double the work of the forty years preceding them.

  Laudalino and Rafael are closer to me genetically than anyone but my parents, because their mother is from my mom’s side and their dad from my father’s. Their father, my paternal grandfather’s first cousin, suffers from a depression that is either unusual on the islands or not often spoken of. My grandfather died early, of heart failure, a condition that accompanied a divergent psychology whose particulars I’ve mostly pieced together from others—a complex arrangement of symptoms and expressions summarized, insufficiently, as psychosis. My paternal grandmother’s hometown was destroyed by a volcano when she was a little girl. My grandfather’s parents, a woman from Pico and a travelling labourer from the continent, died when my grandfather was too young to make a memory of them, from tuberculosis. He was raised by two of his aunts who are old but still living and who I’ve seen this week. My paternal grandmother, after the volcano, immigrated to Connecticut, not Canada, during the fifties, where she first landed as a refugee. She’d never met my grandfather until he, after immigrating to Toronto sometime in the mid-sixties, travelled to Connecticut on business (my dad said he designed and sold clothing? I mostly remember that he went to the hospital and wrote political pamphlets for distribution around our neighbourhood). My grandfather decided they were in love so he brought her back to Toronto to be married, and during the seventies they had three children: my father first, another son, a daughter, each dealing with some health problem first experienced by my grandfather. During his marriage to my grandmother, my grandfather was physically and mentally abusive and his multiple hospitalizations were against his will. At some point, my grandmother left him and took her kids to her parents’ house in Connecticut, but then something happened, I don’t know, and she came back to Toronto never to leave again, and not to remarry after my grandfather’s death.

  Mother’s side: my maternal grandfather is from Pico; both his parents are as well. He is an elder-middle child of over ten kids. He has never had anxiety, depression, or psychosis. He is of a social and generous disposition, and not a controlling one. My maternal grandmother’s parents are from Pico, too, but she was raised until seven by her grandmother on the other side of the island for a reason that has never been made clear to me, and she doesn’t have any siblings. She is of a more nervous disposition than my grandfather, but it’s nothing like the other side of my family. The two have an equitable relationship. They came to Toronto in the early seventies, when my mother was just a year old, and my grandmother was pregnant with a second child, a boy, who passed of crib death at three months. Two years later they had another child, my aunt, and no more. They were nervous and protective of my mother and aunt, who grew up in circumstances my grandparents distrusted and did not understand.

  My mother and father had always known each other, both their families from the islands now living in Toronto. They started to date as teenagers. My mother became pregnant with me shortly after her sixteenth birthday. She confessed it to my father, who proceeded to tell his own father without her consent. My father’s father then bullied my mother’s parents into an arrangement by which they would be married. They first attempted to live together in an apartment downtown, but in destitution, they were moved into my father’s parents’ home.

  My father was mentally and possibly physically abusive with my mother. My mother wanted to leave with me at five, but something happened (the next year, her father-in-law died). We left when I was ten. And then, when I was sixteen, she left me, in order to move to California with a new husband, to an apartment downtown I could barely afford. I was horrified that some circumstance would force me to move back to my childhood home. I immediately began a sexual relationship with someone I looked up to like a father, who was mentally abusive. I was constantly worried that I would become pregnant, and felt furious when I would instead get some physical ailment (UTI) as a substitute for the punishment of pregnancy. And then the rest of life.

  My paternal-paternal great-uncle from this trip has recently been hospitalized, due to his nervous disposition, though he’s spent his whole life here in Pico, and never suffered the trauma of migration between two distinct worlds. There
’s the perspective that he’s sick with what’s in the family blood, and then there’s the perspective that it’s not the blood, that he too has some trauma bounced off from some trauma bounced off from some trauma, stories I don’t even know of connected in some way to the premature death of his aunt and her husband, or to the behaviour of his grandparents.

  The best gift I got in childhood was being left alone by a bunch of unfinished people too focused on their own problems. And so I got some space in the world. The best gift I was given was the void. The freedom to live without boundedness is the freedom that presents me with the bulk of my anxiety at present, but it is a gift. It’s the chance that I can break out of the skipping stone of trauma and somehow not continue to pass it down to children and lovers. Like Weil: from the void, from emptiness, you accept grace. You detach. You can still love while being detached (I’m having a very nice time here!). But you love others in their separateness, in their real being. You do not consecrate histories simply because they were given to you. There violence lies. From grace, and from detachment, you accept that you cannot repair violence or do justice to what you’ve witnessed by bringing it upon another. There is no justice. You separate yourself. You separate yourself from a duty to what came before you, and you start anew.

  (Or how can it be that one is still depressed, living only so barely under capitalism? Shit’s fucking fucked, man!)

  It takes little more than the comically literal repetition of trauma (ages, figures) to demonstrate that it’s not only chance; it really is devotion. If we were less bent upon re-enacting circumstances to which we’ve already been subjected, it would at least look somewhat different the second time.

  * * *

  My grandmother, this week, described the conditions of her poverty upon arriving to Toronto: cramped apartment (check) in the west end of Toronto (check) on the third floor, sweltering hot, with no air conditioning (check, check, check), decorated with furniture taken in from the street (check). She describes it with the same impassioned feeling that she gets describing the poverty she left in Pico (no plumbing, electricity, or preservation of foods). She describes it as though these two states are near equal, only states to depart from. Whereas I see my mild poverty as tolerable, shared, and almost meaningful.